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Author: Eaude, Michael Title: Arturo barea : unflinching eye. life and work of a working-class writer.

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ARTURO BAREA: UNFLINCHING EYE. Life and work of a working-class writer.

by MICHAEL

EAUDE.

A thesis submitted to the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies of the University of Bristol in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Ph.D. in the Faculty of Arts.

UNIVERSITY of BRISTOL. Michael Eaude: ARTURO BAREA: UNFLINCHING EYE. Submitted for the degree of Ph.d in April 1996.

ABSTRACT. The horrors of violent death in the Spanish Civil War inspired Arturo Barea to write when he was already 40. Valor y miedo, sketches of wartime Madrid, shows his descriptive gifts and reflects Stalinist orthodoxy. On exile in 1938, Barea re-thought his writing with La forja, the first volume of the autobiographical trilogy La forja de un rebelde. He rigorously excluded explicit comment and events he had not personally experienced. Barea evoked his slum childhood both to understand himself and reveal the underlying causes of the Civil War. Throughout the trilogy he examines the Church, the Army, Education and the Family -- always through the prism of his own experience -- in order to paint a picture of the Spanish society against which he and his generation rebelled. In England, where he lived with his second wife lisa until his death at Christmas 1957, Barea completed the trilogy. La Ruta denounces corruption and brutality in the colonial army in Morocco during the 1920s. The third volume, La Llama, on the Civil War, is weaker than the other two, in that the narrator's work as censor for the first time diverges from the common experience of his generation. But the intense descriptions of revolutionary upheaval make it an important first-hand testimony. The trilogy is written with objectivity. A passionate partisan for the cause of the working-class, Barea was yet able to examine dispassionately his own actions. This honesty and the perceptions arising from his intermediate position in society (he came from an impoverished family, yet was taken up by a rich uncle: pattern repeated throughout his life) enabled him to write a sincere and vivid account of Spain's ills. In England he became a full-time writer of books, stories and criticism (including Lorca and Unamuno) , and made over 800 broadcasts to South America for the BBC, which he himself wrote and read as Juan de Castilla. Barea developed a theory of social realism: seeking to express the psychological truth underlying events. Despite exile, his work is notable for its lack of bi tterness. He fulfilled his obj ecti ves: to wr i te truthfully about his own life in order to explain the Civil War. ****

.

1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Many thanks to the following, who have all assisted me, in many and differing ways, to complete this thesis.

Marisa

Asensio,

Charlie

(Uni versi ty of Bristol), Cruickshank

Astrue,

Don

Bateman

Collection

Bill and Margaret Carter,

(Faber and Faber),

R.G.

Davis-Poynter,

Constance Dr. Andrew

Durgan, Anthony Eaude, Margaret Eaude and my late father Philip Eaude, Anthony Edkins staff

at

Archi vo

the

(Madrid),

Roland

Gutierrez

(Universi ty

Gilmour

(Bookseller), Elisa de Santos and other

del

Gant,

Martha of

(University of

Herrera Rodrigo

Ministerio

de

Gellhorn,

Tarragona),

Bristol),

Dr

Dr

Asuntos

Exteriores

Professor

Fernandez

Joan Gili,

Peter Heller,

(University of Barcelona),

Dr

John

Dr Maria

Hoover Institution

(Stanford Uni versi ty) , Elvira Huelbes, Sally King, Gladys Langham (Former Secretary, Faringdon Labour Party), Professor Isabel de Madariaga, Professor Ian Michael (Oxford University), Professor Gerald Moser (Pennsylvania State University), R. Martinez Nadal, Regina Martinez, Manuel Pecellin (Diputacion de Badajoz), Olive Renier,

Leonor Rodriguez Barea, Nicolas Riter and Pilar Riter

Rodriguez, Vladimir Rubinstein MBE, Leon J. Stout (Pennsylvania State

University),

Professor

Gareth

Antoni Turull

Reverend

Thomas

Robert

(Bristol

Swanborough

Polytechnic),

(Faringdon), the

late Dr.

(University of Bristol), John Wainwright

(Taylor

Institution Library, Oxford), Jeff Walden and other staff (BBC Written Archives Centre, Weeden

(nee

Rink),

Lord

Caversham), Maruja Wallich, Weidenfeld,

Gollancz) .

..

11

Frances

Wollen

Margaret (Victor

The

contents

research,

of

this

thesis

are my own work,

based on

reading and interviews. The views expressed are

my own and not those of the University of Bristol.

Signed:

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS. Page Abstract Acknowledgements Introduction Abbreviations used

xv

Chapter 1.

Arturo Barea: his life up to 1939

1

Chapter 2.

Valor

l

ii Vl

y

miedo:

propaganda

and

passive

heroism

24

Chapter 3.

Moving beyond 'surface realism'

51

Chapter 4.

The child's eye: La forja

67

Chapter 5.

Anti-imperialism in Morocco: La ruta

94

Chapter 6.

La llama: Revolution

122

Chapter 7.

Life 1n England: 1939 to 1957

156

Chapter 8.

Criticism and stories

188

Chapter 9.

Exile without resentment

213 241

Conclusion Appendix 1 . Appendix 2 .

Publishing history Chronological table of Barea's books and articles

Appendix 3. Appendix 4 . Appendix 5.

245

lIse Pollak/lIsa Barea. 1902 -- 1972 'Senora Smith' The Cordoba tape

257 262 290 296 299

Bibliography lV

Editions of Arturo Barea's books used. VALOR Y MIEDO. Plaza y Janes 1986.

(VM)

(including La forja, llama). Ediciones Montjuich 1959. (FR)

LA FORJA DE UN REBELDE

La

ruta

and La

STRUGGLE FOR THE SPANISH SOUL. Secker & Warburg 1941. LORCA, THE POET AND HIS PEOPLE. Faber & Faber 1944.

(Lorca)

SPAIN IN THE POST-WAR WORLD. Fabian Publications 1945. THE BROKEN ROOT. Faber & Faber 1951. UNAMUNO. Sur 1959. EL CENTRO DE LA PISTA. Cid 1960.

(CP)

Note: The letters VM, FR, Lorca and CP (in brackets above) are used in the footnotes as abbreviations for the respective books.

Note: I have used the Spanish-language editions in all cases, except when not available to me, as was the case for Lorca and The Broken Root.

v

INTRODUCTION. Today Arturo Barea (1897 1957) is largely unread. When reference is made to his work in Spanish literary surveys, he lS usually viewed as a spontaneous, intui ti ve writer, full of naiveties and rough edges; a source for how things used to be but of little lasting value. One of the most recent such surveys maintains this approach. Talking of Valor y miedo, Andres Trapiello gives Barea no credit for conscious organisation of his material: "Es como si el tema impusiera sus tiranicas leyes a la literatura, y no a la inversa." (1)

This view of Barea reflects the initial impact of his writing. Barea had the gift, most notably in his central work, the 800page La forja de un rebelde, of drawing vivid scenes full of movement

and

overwhelming:

life.

The

reader's

first

impression

a world of vi tali ty and colour

is

often

and a wri ter

impassioned for social justice. Written in the 'midnight of the century,' those years when Europe was falling under an even more terrible tyranny than previously, Barea's books are shouts of denunciation and demands for a better life for the impoverished majority.

These first impressions are sound. However, Barea's books are constructed with greater care and skill than he was usually given credit for. In the 3-page introduction to The Track (the version in English of La forja de un rebelde' s second volume), Barea wrote: "I wanted to discover how and why I became what I am ... not through a psychological analysis, but by calling up the images and sensations I had once seen and felt." (2)

.

Vl

Here

Barea

is

sensations,'

stating

i.e.

the

writing is noted for,

that

the

sensuous

evocation

vividness

of

and

'images

and

immediacy his

is a conscious purpose in his writing.

Further evidence of Barea's intentions occurs at the end of La

llama, where he tells of his struggle in Paris during the summer of 1938 to clear his mind of political propagandism and literary abstraction, a struggle which included destroying a whole draft of La forja. His well-known words bear repeating: "Trate de limpiar la pizarra de mi mente, dejandola vacia de todo razonamiento y tratar [sic] de retroceder a mis origenes, a las cosas que habia olido, visto, palpado y sentido." (3) Barea set out deliberately to write concretely and sensuously: his

avoidance

of more

abstract

commentary was

a

conscious

decision. In this, he dovetailed his style of writing into his aims.

As well as Barea' s personal obj ecti ve,

that almost standard

purpose of autobiographers of restoring their mental heal th through an investigation of the source of present ills in the past, his other clearly stated aim was a 'general objective'. Barea wanted 'to expose some of the roots' of the Spanish Civil War and to be vocal on behalf of what 'are usually called the common people' . (4)

This

last

quote

reveals

the poli tical

component of Barea' s

purpose. Barea is expressing his desire to speak on behalf of the silenced masses. He was not political in the sense of offering a coherent political solution to Spain's problems;

that is,

anyway, not the province of the novelist. But he is a political vii

wri ter in the sense that he is an interpreter, observer.

not just an

He looks back into the reasons why the Civil War

occurred. In this he is firmly in the tradition of Unamuno and the 'Generation of '98' in their search for what was wrong with Spain.

This study does not primarily investigate Barea's position in Spanish thought and literature, nor is it a comparative literary study;

rather,

it

seeks

to

evaluate his books

as

Ii terary

investigations into Spanish society and political evaluations of it, and focuses on his vivencia (his lived experience) and how he transformed this into gold in his books. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that his political aims as an interpreter of Spanish life clearly place him alongside other novelists of the Civil War, his compatriots such as Aub, Sender and Gironella as well as foreigners like Serge, Malraux and Hemingway, in their attempts

to

understand

the

issues

and

roots

of

that

war.

Indicative of this is that Barea's first choice for the trilogy's title was Las raices.

Barea's personal

and poli tical aims

writing,

peace

not

in

and

leisure,

intertwined. but

during

He started a

personal

breakdown in the middle of a brutal war. Writing both saved him from

going

mad

and

gave

him

the

sense

that,

despite

his

uselessness (on leaving Spain) as a political activist, he could still contribute to the working-class movement .

...

Vlll

One of Barea's great strengths was that he knew, not just for whom, but to whom he was writing: the millions of Spaniards of his generation and social origins. Because of censorship and the defeat of the Republic, he was hardly read by this audience. But there is no doubt that his clarity about who his potential public was -- something many of his exiled Spanish contemporaries lacked or lost -- helped him to rise above resentment at defeat and exile and achieve his best writing.

Barea's golden years of literary production were from 1937 to 1944, in which period he wrote Valor y miedo, the three volumes of La forja de un rebelde, Lorca the poet and his people and Struggle for the Spanish Soul, as well as several short stories and his critical article Not Spain, but Hemingway.

He was over 40 when his first book was published. Thus he came to letters late. His life quite literally turned over in the middle. He changed jobs, countries and wife. This study examines this

context

to

Barea's

books

alongside

the

writing.

New

information, about both his life in Spain and exile from 1939 in England where he gave over 800 talks for the BBC Latin American service, contributes to an understanding of his work.

Despite his forced exile, as a political refugee from the Franco dictatorship, in a country where he never properly wrote or spoke the language, Arturo Barea lived in England the happiest and most frui tful part of his life. His second wife Ilsa,

a talented

Viennese revolutionary, gave him a broader intellectual outlook ix

and the support

at least for the first years after their

meeting in 1936

of a passionate relationship of equals. He

mellowed: the fiery anti-intellectual young man from the slums of Madrid became a fine literary critic as well as novelist. But just as in his stories and novels, so in his criticism, Barea never lost sight of the realities of Spanish working-class life. He wrote on several occasions that Spaniards have two hungers: for food and for knowledge. And in all his writing his eyes were focused on explaining the unjust system which kept the peasantry and working-class he came from ignorant and starved; and not on explaining it to intellectuals, but with a language and approach designed to explain it to the working-class.

The investigation into Spanish reality, with which Ganivet and Unamuno charged the youth at the turn of the century,

runs

through all Barea's work: stories, critical articles, broadcasts and novels. It provides Barea's oeuvre with its basic unity of purpose. Although he started to write, in Valor y miedo, under the influence of the

ideas of Stalinist social realism,

he

developed, both intellectually and in practice, a cri tique of the cruder type of realism. He rejected what he felt was the 'surface realism'

of an earlier wri ter about Madrid,

identified more

with Ram6n

Sender,

poli tical novelist of his generation,

the

Pio Baroj a.

outstanding

He

Spanish

in trying to penetrate

beneath the surface of how things appeared, to reach a deeper 'psychological realism'. Sender recognised a kindred spirit and paid Barea one of his high-sounding compliments:

x

"Here is a soul wi th vision, and perhaps a sensi ti ve witness, faithful to the spirit of the Spanish people in the midst of the confusion that surrounds us." (5)

Barea's vision is greatly aided by his objectivity, a quality which at first glance seems contradictory in an autobiographical novelist.

But

his

is

not

the

objectivity of

the

detached

commentator. He shared with many writers of the '30s, notably Victor Serge, the view that real objectivity was only possible through partisanship.

Barea is partisan in the cause of the

oppressed: " [They are] the millions who shared the same experiences and disappointments [as me, but who] do not usually write" (6).

Barea had the ability -- it is rare but should be essential in a partisan -- to record what he actually saw, without allowing what he saw to be falsified by what he believed. Thus he observed brutality without averting his eye; he recorded negative aspects of working-class behaviour without trying to prettify; he saw many faults in his own behaviour without either yielding to the temptation to conceal them or revelling in the confession of his slns.

This objectivity in looking at himself as well as his sincerity (infrequent qualities in a censor, Barea's job during the Civil War!)

enabled Barea to provide a unique first-hand record of

Spain in the first 40 years of this century. He used himself and his own reactions as a touchstone for the experiences of his generation. His honesty can only be faulted in his political

Xl

attitude to Stalinism and occasional boasting, but never in his observation of concrete detail and events.

Barea does not rate among the greatest writers. He is limited by one of his strengths: his inability to write well about what he himself had not experienced. As a novelist he does not have the breadth

of

invention

or

imagination

of

his

Spanish

contemporaries, Max Aub, Sender or Cela. He is limited too by a lack of political overview in explaining the 'midnight of the century' through which he lived: a defect which sets him below Serge or Orwell.

But Arturo Barea should be valued higher than he is at present. His neglected position as a writer is due to several factors: most obviously, his defects, but these are somewhat exaggerated by the poor editing of the Buenos Aires first edition, repeated in

subsequent

categories

editions.

He

and generations

individualist,

is

also

cri tics

hard

are

to

fit

fond of.

who went his way separate

into

the

He was

an

from poli tical or

artistic schools. He had the misfortune to die relatively young, before

he

could

have

a

direct

imoact

on

the

post-Franco

generations. But, most importantly, Barea is too direct, crude and brutal: not qualities valued in a more ironic age, which wishes to draw a veil over the conflicts of the Civil War.

Barea invented a form in Spanish letters, the autobiographical novel.

The

Bolloten,

outstanding historian of

the Civil War,

considered La forja de un rebelde,

..

Xll

Burnett

"una magnifica

obra ... Contiene datos valiosisimos para la historia"

(7). The

best political English writer of his generation, George Orwell, thought the same book 'excellent' (8). And the most successful post-war

Spanish-language

writer,

Gabriel

Garcia

Marquez,

considered it the best book written by a Spaniard in Castilian since the Civil War (9).

This study aims to give substance to these words of high praise by examining the

seven golden years

of Barea' s

creativity,

alongside the anguished ferment of his first 40 years and the milder decline of his last 13.

**************************

, ,

.

Xlll

NOTES. 1. Trapiello, Andres, Las armas y las letras, pp.283-4. 2. Barea, Arturo, The Track,

(Barcelona 1994),

(London 1984), introduction, p.7.

3. Barea, Arturo, La forja de un rebelde, (Mexico 1959), p.787. The unhappy repetition of the verb 'tratar' is an example of the sloppiness of the Spanish version, which is discussed in Appendix 1. It is interesting to compare this statement of intent by Barea with what Martha Gellhorn wrote twenty years later: "I was always afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures which were special to this moment and this place ... The point of these articles is that they are true; they tell what I saw." (Gellhorn, Martha, The Face of War, (London 1959), Introduction. The coincidence of Gellhorn' s wi th Barea' s words has two implications. First, Barea's methods were similar to those of an outstanding journalist in pin-pointing detail in order to reveal the reality of a situation; and secondly the impact of what can loosely be called the "school" of left-wing, partisan but realist writer-journalists -- Gellhorn, Hemingway, dos Passos, Ehrenburg and others lesser-known --, with whom Barea came into contact when working as a censor during the Civil War, was seminal to his work. 4. Barea, Arturo, The Track, introduction, p.8. 5. Sender, Ramon J., 'The Spanish Autobiography of Arturo Barea, ' The New Leader (U.S.A.), 11/1/47. 6. Barea, Arturo, The Track, introduction, p.8. 7. Bolloten, Burnett, Letter to Arturo Barea, 10/6/50 (Hoover Institution) . 8. Orwell, George, 'Review' in Horizon, quoted on the cover of The Forge (London 1984). 9. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, Notas de prensa, 1980-1984, (Madrid 1991), p.411. "In Castilian," for in this article GGM considered Merce Rodoreda' s Pla9a del diamant the best post-war Spanish book.

XlV

ABBREVIATIONS USED. BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation. COMINTERN. Communist International. JSU. Juventudes socialistas unificadas. (Uni ted Socialist Youth) . LRB. Leonor Rodriguez Barea (Arturo Barea's niece). PCE.

Partido comunista espanol. (Spanish Communist Party) .

POUM. Partido obrero de unificaci6n marxista. (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) . PSOE. Partido socialista obrero Workers Party) .

espanol.

(Spanish Socialist

PSUC. Partit socialista unificat de Catalunya. (United Socialist Party of Catalonia) . TLS. The Times Literary Supplement. TVE. Televisi6n espanola.

(Spanish Television) .

UGT. Uni6n general de trabajadores. (General Union of workers) . USSR. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. WAC. Written Archives Centre of the BBC at Caversham.

xv

CHAPTER ONE.

ARTURO BAREA: HIS LIFE UP TO 1939. THE FORGING OF ARTURO. The known facts of Arturo Barea Ogazon's early life are mainly those gleaned from La forja de un rebelde. The author was born in Badajoz,

close to the Portuguese border,

at 8.20 p.m.

on

September 20 th , 1897 (1). His father Miguel died there, at the age of only 34, shortly after Arturo's birth. In the memorable phrase of Arturo's paternal grand-mother Ines: "Cuando tu madre se quedo viuda, 10 unico que Dios hizo por ella, fue dejarla en un hotel con dos duros en el bolsillo y tu padre fiambre en la cama." (2) The unfortunate Miguel had nearly died 14 years earlier, for he had been involved in the Republican rebellion of 1883: "Tu padre fue uno de los sargentos de Villacampa y no Ie fusilaron por milagro." (3) He had remained connected to the army as a recruiting agent. As such he travelled, often accompanied by his family. Within a few weeks of Arturo's birth,

his bereaved mother Leonor,

the new

baby and her three other children had returned from Badajoz to Madrid, where his mother's brother Jose offered them some sort of protection (4).

The impoverished widow was advised to hand her children over to charitable

institutions,

but

refused.

This

loyal

act

of

a

hard-working and self-sacrificing woman,

already 38 years old

when

enough

Arturo

was

born,

provides

motive

for

Arturo's

lifelong sentimental adoration of her. He was to dedicate to her 1

both the trilogy ('a la Senora Leonor') and La raiz rota ('Mama. In Memoriam'). provide Arturo's

a

His mother's unstated needs and his desire to

decent

old

age

for

her were

decisive

early rej ection of a wri ting or

circus

factors career

In and

search for more moneyed paths.

In Madrid, Leonor earned her living by washing soldiers' clothes in the Manzanares River in the company of other washerwomen and by working as a servant in the house of her brother Jose. She lived with her children In one of the many garrets in the old slum district of El Avapies or

'Lavapies,'

as it carne to be

known in Arturo's lifetime. This was Arturo's barrio: "AI Avapies ... aprendi todo 10 que se, 10 bueno y 10 malo. A rezar aDios y a maldecirle. A odiar y a querer. Aver la vida cruda y desnuda, tal como es. Y a sentir ~l ansia infinita de subir y ayudar a subir a todos el esca16n de mas arriba." (5) Arturo's eldest brother Vicente (given the name of Jose in the trilogy)

was sent to

live wi th his mother's eldest brother,

owner of a drapery store in C6rdoba, at the age of 11 (6). From an early age the only sister,

Concha,

helped Leonor with her

domestic and laundry work. Miguel (Rafael in the trilogy) also had to start work as early as he could (7). Arturo's destiny was different.

He was

taken into his Uncle

Jose's middle-class horne and there began to be instilled with the idea that he would gain an education and one day be the heir of the childless Jose and his wife Baldomera. The child nurtured the desire to be an engineer (8). This

division in Barea' s

life,

starting before his

earliest

memory, created the conditions for the duality of his vision as a writer. The child inhabited both the poor and the comfortable worlds, but he was fully at home in neither: a crucial factor in his development as person and writer.

2

The

young Arturo

week-ends mother,

spent most

in the

of

the week at

his

aunt's

and

rat and cockroach-infested garret with his

sister and brother. Until 1910 he attended one of the

Escuelas pias, San Fernando, in the Calle Sombrerete (9). In the long summer holidays, like so many Madrid children before and since,

he would be

the pueblo or,

taken or sent to

in

Arturo's case, three pueblos. The most lyrical passages of the trilogy (Chapters III - VI of La forja)

describe the summer of

1907

pueblos where he had

which Arturo

family:

Brunete

mother's)

spent (on

in

his

the

three

father's

and Navalcarnero,

side),

Mentrida

(on

where his father's mother,

his

Ines,

lived. This experience of two or three months in the country was repeated all the summers of his childhood up to 1910. On these

summer visi ts

practical

everyday

love

the

young Arturo was wrapped in the

and

life

of

big,

varied,

working

families. He was no longer the affection-starved orphan obliged to

act

properly

clinging

rather

in

his

aunt's

strict

pathetically to

his

house,

nor

mother's

the

skirts

garret during the rare moments she was not working. throw off

respectable,

tight-fi tting

clothes

child in

the

He could

along wi th

the

restrictive customs. He could forget that he was the prize in the middle of a tug-of-war between his mother and aunt. And

in

the

country,

Arturo's

desire

to

be

an

engineer was

founded at his Uncle Luis's forge: "En una mano las tenazas largas con el hierro al rojo, cogido en la punta, y en la otra el martillo pequeno ... y con el que, de vez en cuando qolpea el solo el hierro caliente y le transforma. Esto era para -mi -10 maravilloso." (10) For

the

boy,

the

transformation

of metal

from one

form

to

another was fascinating. The marvellous in this process combined in his mind with the generous personality of Luis, who "queria repartir la fortuna a todo el mundo"

3

(11).

CHANGED CIRCUMSTANCES: WORK.

But wi th his uncle Jose's

sudden death ln 1911,

the

young

Barea's circumstances changed. The perspective of training to be an englneer receded. At first, under the influence of her -

confessor, Jesuit

his aunt Baldomera wanted to place the boy in a

school

and herself

retire

to

a

convent.

But

Ines'

intervention frustrated the Jesuits' desire to educate the boy ( 12) .

Because of arguments over Jose's inheritance, relations between Arturo's aunt and her many poor relatives deteriorated: she even quarrelled with Arturo's mild mother. Despondent and irritable at all the adults (evidence for some critics of Barea's rancour and resentment), the 13-year old had to leave school and go to work.

Strictly speaking,

he did not have to leave school. But his

pride at not becoming a charity boy, as his priest-teachers had suggested, meant that he took a job ln a costume jewellery shop,

La Mina de Oro, in the calle Carmen

a place that was no gold-

mine even for the proprietor (13). Arturo slept ln the shop and on top of his food earned 10 pesetas a month. He didn't last long. In outraged reaction to a curse and a cuff from the owner Don Arsenio, he threw Don Arsenio's gramophone to the ground. Thus he showed his quick temper when his pride was touched and lost the first of many jobs (14).

4

Arturo returned to school to study accountancy.

But he had

grown: and his aunt, forced to adapt, no longer treated him like a child. In the summer of 1911 he sat entrance exams In simple accountancy and letter-writing for Banking (15). And on August 1 st 1911, two months before his 14th birthday, he became an employee of the Credit Lyonnais, unpaid for the first year. He was no longer able to spend the summer running through the fields of Mentrida.

As he was growing into his adolescence, Barea took on what was to be the lifelong shape of his body: quite tall for a Spaniard of his time, lean and gaunt. When he was 25, he commented:

" ... ml. cara no habia dieciseis afios." ( 16)

cambiado

apenas

de

cuando

tenia

When he first started working in the bank, he became so thin that his mother sent him to a doctor, who scared Arturo with the opinion that he was in danger of developing tuberculosis. To build up his chest and muscles, he joined the Club Atletico Espanol, which was rather less grand than its name: "[El club] ... estaba alojado en una calleja del mas misero barrio de prostibulos, y alii vegetaba en un s6tano 16brego." (17) In the bank, Arturo rapidly learnt the ropes, but soon became disillusioned with his prospects. His experiences there, along with his haughty refusal to accept injustice against himself and his extension of this refusal to include others of his class, led him to join the UGT (18). The UGT was the union set up by the PSOE. Its reputation and educational influence, through the Casas del Pueblo set up round the country, tended to be greater than its actual industrial strength. 'Whi te-collared, blackcoated' employees like bank workers were just as exploited as manual workers, but lacked the organisation to better their conditions through strike action (19). The young Arturo, introduced by his older friend Luis Pia, was part of the first wave of white-collar employees to become unionised in Spain. 5

DIAMONDS, TOYS AND THE CIRCUS. On the day the papers were announcing the start of the First World War, in August 1914, Arturo left the Credit Lyonnais in umbrage (20). The evidence for what he did during the war is scanty, as the period falls between La Forja, ending in 1914, and La Ruta, which begins in 1920. It appears that Barea was lucky in his precipitous exit from the Credit Lyonnais. He found a clerical situation two days later; and then a job in an agency which processed applications to the Government for patents. But he soon left the agency to become a travelling buyer for a German merchant, buying diamonds in France for re-sale in Spain and Latin America (21). The young Barea enjoyed the money and prestige of this exotic job. For someone of his background to be staying in hotels in Paris at the age of 18, with money In his pocket, was a miracle (22). But, as a UGT member, he was not entirely easy in mind at making money out of the war. He desired to make money, was intelligent enough to do it, liked the things money could buy and told himself he could thus provide comfort for his mother in her old age. But at the same time, his conscience told him he was exploiting others and abandoning his friends in Avapies and the bank. In 1915 or 1916, using the 30,000 pesetas he had inherited in his uncle's will, Barea, in partnership with other members of his family, opened a small factory to manufacture toys and dolls (23). Spain, a neutral in the First World War, was enjoying a new prosperity as it made arms and provided food and clothing for the contenders. Victor Serge, working in Barcelona in 1917, explained: "We were all working for the war ... Clothes, hides, shoes, canned goods, grenades, machine parts, everything, even fruit ... everything that our hands made, worked, manipulated, embellished was drained off by the war ... The war raised salaries." (24) Barea remarked later on another aspect of Spain's war-time economy: 6

"[Nuestra fabrica abrio] ... en un momento en que la coyuntura del mercado la favorecia, ya que la guerra mundial habia cortado las importaciones a Espana." (25) So while goods useful to the war were sucked out of the country, there were fewer imports of non-essential goods, at a time when there was more spending money. Condi tions seemed ideal for launching a small toy factory. However Arturo lost most of his inheri tance and savings in this venture: the factory went bankrupt, at least partly because of Arturo's capricious dissatisfaction with making conventional dolls: "Queria ofrecer a los chicos juguetes nuevos, algo mas vivo que esas munecas del monton." (26)

If we are to accept the time-sequence of the autobiographical meditation El centro de la pista (the story in his book of the same name), Barea considered joining a circus in 1915 after the factory's failure. Through both the gym and the toy factory, Barea had come to know circus clowns.

In his childhood, his

uncle Jose had taken him every Thursday to the circus, where the spoiled child delighted in explaining the tricks to his uncle (27) •

Even while the factory was In operation, Barea had found the circus's allure a relief for his boredom. He wrote sketches for the

clowns.

He

attempted

to

glve

the

Clrcus

a

political

justification: "No sirvo para capitalista. No quiero explotar la estupidez y miseria de los demas, ni quiero que me exploten a mi. No puedo cambiar el mundo, al menos esto es 10 que me dicen, y los socialistas me cuentan que no puedo estar con ellos despues de haber sido uno de los patronos. Y ahora Gque? Tengo que hacer algo completamente distinto para ensenarle al mundo su verdadera cara. Lo aceptaran de boca de un payaso que valga algo en su oficio, no 10 aceptarian de un escritor." (28) It is interesting that Barea linked the work of a clown to that of a wri ter,

which during this period he had rej ected as a 7

career option after frustrating encounters with famous writers such

as

Pedro

Intermittently,

de

Repide

and

Benavente

in

1913

(29) •

Barea was looking for an artistic outlet:

he

wanted not just to change things but "to show the world its real face". This is what he was to achieve with the trilogy.

It

is

clear

too

that

the

young

individualist

to

work

in

the

mili tant:

comment that

his

Barea was

union

ranks

too

much

as

a

of

an

political

the UGT would not permi t

him is

unconvincing, as they would undoubtedly have accepted evidence of a commi tment in practice,

as indeed they did after 1931.

Barea shared the classic dilemma of the radical petit-bourgeois of not wanting to work for anyone else, yet not wanting to be a boss.

These

adolescent

years

show

the

contradictory

pulls

and

yearnings of Barea's character. He could not stand the boredom of the factory; yet he was too scrupulous to be a boss. After his shop and bank experiences, he dreaded the prospect of being an

employee.

Wri ting

seemed

impossible.

At

this

period,

he

defines everything negatively. The circus briefly seemed a way out: " . .. estaba decidido a escapar. Si no, al fin, podria atraparme y convertirme en un buen burguesito 0 un buen empleadito, y iqueria estar vivo y peleando!" (30)

MOTORES ESPANA. Barea

finally

settled,

at

least

temporarily,

this

angst

concerning his future by deciding not to enter the circus and instead accept

a

good,

though conventional, 8

job

in

the

new

Motores Espana factory in Guadalaj ara.

On a rather pathetic

note, El centro de la pista ends: "'No es mas que en un puesto en la oficina, pero tal vez me dejaran trabajar en el departamento de construcciones. (31) 'II

But these renewed dreams of becoming an engineer were not to be fulfilled. He started to work at Motores Espana in 1916/17, when he was 19. Guadalajara was the political fief of the Conde de Romanones, Prime Minister in 1915/16, and, along with the King and the Catalan magnate Miquel Mateu, the major share-holder in Motores Espana. At Guadalaj ara,

Barea first viewed at close

quarters the machinations of monopoly capital, which was later to inform his reactions against Spain's occupation of Morocco (32) •

It is well worth underlining the extraordinary di versi ty of Barea's experience before he was 20. He had been shop-worker, bank worker and trades unionist.

He had actively sought to

become a writer and to join a circus. He had co-owned a factory and travelled internationally for a diamond trader.

Now

he

managlng

became

secretary

to

Don

director of Motores

enormous pay-roll of this

Juan

Espana.

aircraft

de

Zaracondegui,

Barea deal t

factory.

wi th

the the

In addi tion he

interviewed and took on workers (33). Chalmers-Mitchell tells us that, faced with corruption: "[Barea] took refuge in an increased study of the technical side." (34) Undoubtedly the 'technical side' fascinated Barea, but he also became involved in an amorous adventure and had to leave the factory rapidly (35). He returned to a post-war capital, which

9

he later described: " ... a turbulent Madrid, hectic wi th the gaiety of the wartime boom which was rapidly waning, shaken by the aftermath of the first big clashes between organised workers and the new employer class, stimulated by the many short-lived periodicals which sprang up to cater for a new, avid reading public." (36)

MOROCCO. In 1920 Barea was conscripted into the Army. For his first few months he could stay in Madrid, in the Montana barracks, before being sent to Morocco (37). This period is covered in La Ruta and it would be a duplication of what is contained in Chapter 5 to review more than the bare bones of Barea's military life.

He arrived in Ceuta, as a sergeant, in late 1920. Because of his ability and scientific knowledge, he was assigned to office work concerning

the

womanising,

both

construction in

Tetuan

of

a

road.

brothels

He

(while

pursued

his

hypocritically

affecting distaste for the sexual desires of his colleagues) and with a woman in Ceuta. He wrote odd pieces for army magazines. And he was faced with the fact of generalised corruption, which his scruples made him seek to avoid (38).

He caught typhus in the wake of the historic Spanish defeat at Anual in 1921: the defeat which marked the beginning of the complex sequence of events which brought Primo de Rivera to power. Barea was lucky to survive such a serious illness, which nevertheless,

by

weakening

his

heart,

contributed

to

his

premature death. On convalescent leave in Cordoba, he rejected the urgings of his brother and cousins and refused to enter the Army full-time on officer training (39). 10

Once again he had rejected the more comfortable option out of unease and a refusal to be tied to a conventional career. But we have seen how he also rejected a more unconventional life as a circus clown or a writer. Indecision and restlessness mark these years.

MARRIAGE.

In 1924, Arturo left Morocco and the Army. In this year too, he married disastrously. Family lore has it that he was trapped into marrying Aurelia Rimaldos by a false pregnancy. If this is so, it is perhaps no more than he deserved for his 'love 'em and leave 'em' attitude. With Aurelia, he had four children, born in the late '20s and early '30s (40).

In

1921

his

sister

Concha

had

also

married,

and

more

successfully, a furniture-maker, called Agustin in the trilogy, who became a close friend of Arturo's. Barea got on well too with his sister during the '20s, although he tells us he was jealous that his mother spent so much time carlng for Concha's children. Their mother found a job as a caretaker in the Calle Fuencarral with a flat attached: a way of providing Concha and her many children with a home

(41). But Aurelia got on with

neither Concha, nor Arturo's mother, nor for that matter his brother

Miguel's

wife

conventional atti tudes,

(42).

Her

snobbery,

ignorance

and

along wi th Barea' s restlessness,

all

rapidly contributed to removing any love from the marriage.

11

On his return from Morocco, Barea got a job in a patents office. Whether this was the same office where he had worked at the start of the First World War is not known. Here he worked until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936; although there appears to have been at least one interval, when for several months he was temporary business manager on a large Castilian estate,

Dehesa

Casablanca,

where

his

brother Miguel

was

the

Permanent

Manager (43).

Arturo's job in the Patents Office was a good one: he had an office on the Calle Alcala, the heart of Madrid's business area; and by the start of the Civil War had a gold cedula,

a card

identifying the carrier as belonging to a high lncome bracket (44). As well as supporting his own wife and children, he was able to channel money towards his sister's family. "Hubo una epoca mala ... en la que mi madre y Concha tuvieron que aceptar la ayuda de instituciones de caridad." (45) But by the late 1920s Barea was able to make real his childhood dream

that

his

mother

should

enjoy

an

old

age

free

from

financial anxiety.

SECOND REPUBLIC.

His mother Leonor, who had told the young Arturo tales of the First Republic,

when she had been a young girl in domestic

service, lived to see the Second Republic, the cause for which his father had nearly died in 1883. Leonor herself died in 1931 at the age of 72 or 73 (46). Barea was only too aware of how his mother had sacrificed any hopes of her own by refusing to put him in an orphanage and accepting the humiliation of domestic 12

service In her brother-in-Iaw's house, so that Arturo could gain an education.

His mother had died still yoked to the cart,

'uncida al carro' in her own words, but without bitterness (47). However, Barea could not accept her death so easily. "Inquietud y incertidumbre me hacian mas echar de menos algo fijo y seguro en las relaciones humanas". (48) And indeed from 1931 to 1936, Arturo was to have much less to do with his sister or brother and his marriage was to break down completely. His lifelong dissatisfaction developed into a drawnout emotional crisis, only resolved in the generalised crisis of the Civil War.

In 1930/31,

Barea became involved with his secretary In the

Patents Office, Maria, in a relatively stable relationship which was to last for 6 years. And in 1934, he separated from Aurelia for a year (49).

A more posi ti ve product of the restlessness provoked by the proclamation of the Republic and by his mother's death,

was

Barea's return to a more active political life: "It is significant to notice that senor Barea was not a rebel against the existing social organisation from failure to succeed. But his past experiences and an unhappy marriage had disabused him of life, and until 1931 he withdrew entirely to his work." (50) It was under the influence of Carlos Rubiera, a Socialist deputy for

Madrid

and

later

secretary

federation,

that

Barea

started

to

of

the

work

Madrid again

In

Socialist the

UGT,

organising clerical workers: "His [Barea's] political convictions led him into a more and more advanced form of socialism, and his work in organising black-coated labour was in acute and bitter conflict with his professional occupation, which was in daily contact with international heavy industry." (51) 13

CIVIL WAR.

La llama covers the period from 1935 to 1938 and, as with La

ruta, this summary will not repeat in detail what is contained in the volume. In short, Barea took part in the assault on the Montana barracks at the outbreak of the military rebellion on July 18 th , 1936. He then offered his services to the Casa del

Pueblo and,

due

to

his military experience

In Morocco,

was

assigned to train soldiers. In September 1936, through contacts in the PCE and because of his supposed knowledge of French and English,

he went to work for the Foreign Press Bureau in the

Telef6nica. There he met Ilsa Kulcsar, with whom he was to spend the rest of his life (52). During the Government evacuation of Madrid in November 1936, Barea stayed in the city, now at the head of the Foreign Press Censorship. From June 1937 he began to broadcast, a job he retained when two or three months later he was sacked as press censor. In November 1937 he and Ilsa left Madrid. Barea was suffering a nervous breakdown, brought on by the

pressures

of

his

job,

political

tensions

he

could not

resolve and the horrors of the city's bombardment. Realising the impossibility of

resuming his

job,

he and Ilsa went

to

the

Levante, then to Barcelona and left Spain, never to return,

in

February 1938.

Throughout this period of intense struggle and anxiety, all the conflicts

of

Barea's

life

were

speeded

up,

thrown

into

a

melting-pot and, for better or worse, resolved: sexual, family, political and work conflicts. The political and sexual problems are discussed in Chapter 6: family and work is dealt with here.

14

FAMILY.

By 1935, Arturo Barea was in a rut. The opening of La llama finds him attempting to start afresh with Aurelia by moving to the village of Noves,

but unable to break from Maria.

elections convened for

February 1936 gal vanised him.

The

As an

outsider in Noves, he could play an organising role which the peasants and landless labourers themselves could not. He took the initiative in organising an election meeting for the Popular Front.

In

March

1936,

after

the

Popular

Front's

election

victory, Arturo moved his family back to Madrid from Noves. Arturo liked the big flat he found in Ave Maria street: " ... estaba cerca del centro y de mi oficina ... ademAs por ser una de las calles que conducen al Lavapies, el barrio donde habia pasado mi nifiez." (53) But Aurelia was miserable. She did not like the fact that the other neighbours were all workers.

She fel t

she and Arturo

belonged to a higher social class, as indeed they did (54). But her wishes were over-ridden by Arturo.

The elections at Noves had helped him realise that he was not just a

paper

socialist.

Moving

to Ave Maria

street was

a

reassertion of his Madrid working-class background. As the skein towards war unwound itself in the country as a whole, so Arturo began to unpick his contradictions and take sides. Ultimately, his marriage responsibilities to a woman he did not like and to their four children were nothing, beside his own desires to base himself again in the Madrid he knew and to spend his

time

discussing politics with old and new friends in the local bars. "Tal vez, 10 unico que yo queria era volver a mis raices". (55) 15

Barea's acceptance of work in the Press Censorship in September 1936 was to be inextricably linked with his desire to get away from the

'atm6sfera helada' of his and Aurelia's home

(56).

Before his first night at work, he felt: entusiasmado y libre ... Me habia explicado a mi mismo y a las dos mujeres, una despues de otra, [Maria y Aurelia] que tenia que trabajar de noche y dormir de dia ... No tendria que pelearme mas con la oficiosidad pesada de la otra. n (57) n •••

In those terrifying days, Barea abandoned his wife and children alone in the flat.

One day,

after a night of sleeplessness

because of the shelling, Aurelia went to the Telef6nica to find her husband. "Le dij e que 10 que tenia que hacer era marcharse con los ninos fuera de Madrid. Me contest6 que 10 que yo queria era deshacerme de ella. Y en verdad, a pesar de la preocupacion seria que me causaban los ninos dentro de los multiples peligros de la ciudad, sabia que no se enganaba mucho." (58) Aurelia and the children were evacuated to Valencia in a convoy of Foreign Ministry families some weeks later (59). In mid-1937, when Barea was on leave in Valencia, he asked Aurelia for a divorce. His sister Concha, aware of the poverty Aurelia could be facing,

advised her not to sign the divorce papers.

But

Aurelia,

'la tonta,' in Concha's words, signed, stating:

'Soy

moderna'

(60). The following year, Barea married lIsa. After

leaving Valencia in November 1937, he never saw Aurelia agaln ( 61) .

WORK.

The patents office was closed in August 1936. From September 1936 until about a month before leaving Madrid in November 1937, Barea worked as press censor, and from July 1937 also as radio 16

broadcaster. The censorship meant huge pressure: for the first few months, he worked 16 hours a day and slept in the office. Moreover, the office in the Telef6nica building -- at that time, the tallest building in the city and on top of a hill

was in

the direct line of fire of the Nationalist troops dug In two or three kilometres away.

Both lIsa and Arturo expected to be

killed (62).

Martha Gellhorn remembers that Barea, always wearing a beret, appeared quiet and dreamy In manner: "[He was] ... a silent, mousy, depressed-looking round-shouldered and bowed, thin, pale and ill." (63)

man,

John Dos Passos wrote that Barea "[was] cadaverous ... [and] ... looks

underslept

and underfed"

(64).

The

journalist

Sefton

Delmer provided a vivid account of his visit to the Telef6nica on 16 November, 1936: "lnside ... all was darkness, and assault guards. At last we found the censors ... They were sitting at a table with flickering candles lighting their faces. Sandbags covered the windows. The chief [Barea] was a cadaverous Spaniard with deep furrows of bitterness around his mouth, dug deeper by the shadows from his candle. He looked the very embodiment of Spanishness, tense and suspicious, clenched ready to take national umbrage."(65) Unlike many of the foreign journalists, lIsa and Arturo did not participate In the round of drinking in each others' bedrooms in the Hotel Florida, where the majority of foreign journalists stayed, or at Gaylord's or Chicote

(66). Arturo preferred to

drink in Serafin's bar during the brief snatches of time away from work. There he could chat with people he'd known for much of his life; later, find material for his radio broadcasts; and also, no doubt, enjoy the role of the man with an important job. Barea's job brought him into frequent conflict with the foreign

17

correspondents, another factor making it difficult for him to fall into easy socialising with them. Gellhorn commented: "We were a jokey bunch. They [Ilsa and Arturo] didn't eat with us." (67) Doubtless, Arturo found less to joke about.

Barea's lifelong contradictions about what he should do and be were overcome during this first period of censorship work. When he was younger, he had darted different ways, torn between his impulse to fight injustice and his desire to make money for himself and his family. When a child of 10 in his Uncle Luis's forge, he had enjoyed briefly the sense he was no longer a child split between two worlds.

In 1936 Madrid,

he again briefly

attained the same sense of unity and purpose. He was a volunteer in a vital job, who between November 7th and 12th took important decisions both to prevent the press censorship's collapse and keep open Madrid's contact with the world. The job both required all his intellectual abili ties and at the same time was on behalf of and alongside the working-class he identified with.

This feeling of having overcome his contradictions was shortlived. But Barea was never to return to routine work. He emerged from the Civil War doing what he had wanted, but had not dared nor been able to do as an adolescent: the crisis of the War made him a writer.

BARCELONA AND PARIS.

After being sacked from the censorship,

then from the radio,

Barea left Madrid in November 1937, going via the Levante to 18

Barcelona,

where

he

finished

Valor

y

miedo

(using

an

old

typewriter Sefton Delmer had given him) and found a publisher for

it.

Kulcsar

Here

too he met the Stalinist

('Poldi'),

Ilsa's

husband,

whom

functionary Leopold Barea

feared

and

disliked for his political dogmatism. Poldi assisted them with exit visas and left the earliest testimony to Arturo and lIsa's happiness together: "[Poldi] ninos." (68)

nos cont6 que

los habia hallado felices

como

The unfortunate Poldi died suddenly in January 1938, allowing lIsa and Arturo to marry. They left Spain for the last time on February 22 th , 1938 (69), the day their exit visa expired. For a miserable year of physical hardship they lived in Paris in the grandiosely named flea-pit Hotel de l'Alhambre (known to them as the

Hotel

del

hambre) ,

hand-to-mouth

on

the

occasional

translation or article, while the European War drew closer (70). However, whereas lIsa spent many weeks ill, Arturo's general health improved. He was away from the bombardments and stress of Madrid. And from Barcelona came copies of his first book, Valor y miedo,

which gave him the confidence to continue to write.

During that summer of 1938, through his struggles to start La

forja, Barea revolutionised his approach to writing (71).

In March 1939, they obtained entrance papers for England and left the atmosphere of demoralisation, racism and approaching war. They were lucky to get out; and lucky in their way of doing it. In order to pay their bill at the Hotel del hambre, they had a win on the lottery (72). ***************

19

NOTES. 1. Birth certificate. Juzgado de Badajoz. Arturo was born at his parents' address, Calle Magdalena, 20. 2. FR, p.70 3. Ibid. p.70. Barea's niece added family reminiscences: "Se dice que era un golfo ... y cuando despues de su muerte pas6 alguien para cobrar una deuda, [la madre de Arturo] Ie dijo: Yaqui tienes las senas del moroso, ve y busca el dinero en el cementerio'." Interview with Leonor Rodriguez Barea, Madrid, 17/9/94. Leonor is the oldest daughter of Arturo Barea's sister Concha. This source is hereafter referred to as LRB. 4. Interview with LRB, Madrid, 23/6/90. 5. FR, pp. 8 9- 90 6. Ibid. p.338 7. The real names of some family members mentioned In the trilogy were supplied by LRB. 8. FR, Chapter I. 9. In the opening days of the Spanish Civil War, Arturo's old school burned before his eyes (La llama, Ch. VIII). 10. FR, p.52 11 . Ibid. p.53 12. Ibid. pp.136-137 13. Ibid. p.141 14. Ibid. p.151 15. Ibid. pp.160-161 16. Ibid. p.354 17. Barea, Arturo, El centro de la pista,

(CP), p. 138.

18. FR, p.222 19. Chalmers-Mitchell, Sir Peter, in Barea, Arturo, (Faber, London 1941), introduction, p.9.

The Forge

20. FR, pp. 245-246 21. Chalmers-Mitchell, art. cit., p.9 22. The C6rdoba tape. See Appendix 5. This is a tape-recording in the possession of Leonor Rodriguez Barea, of part of a radio interview with Arturo Barea in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1956. 20

23. CP, p.145 24. Serge, Victor, Birth of our power, London 1977), p.70

(Wri ters and Readers,

25. CP, p.142 26. Ibid. p.142 27. Ibid. p.137 28. Ibid. P .143 29. FR, pp.376 ff .. For further discussion, see Chapter 5. 30. CP, P .143 31. Ibid. p.147 32. FR, pp.357-359 33. Ibid. p.357 34. Chalmers-Mitchell, art. cit., p.10 35. FR, p.359 36. Barea, Arturo, in The Dark Wedding by Ramon J. (London 1948), introduction, p.10.

Sender

37. FR, p.572 says "algunas semanas"; but the English verSlon (The Clash, p.120) says "a few months". 38.

FR,

pp. 257-258 and constant subsequent references In

La

ruta.

39. Ibid. pp. 345-6 40. LRB. Arturo and Aurelia's Adolfina, Arturo and Enrique.

children were called Carmen,

41. FR, p.515; and LRB. Concha had nine children, two of whom died in infancy, between 1922 and 1934. 42. FR, p.516; and LRB. 43. Barea, Arturo, Struggle for the Spanish Soul, pp.34-37. 44. FR, p.573 45. Ibid. p.515 46. Ibid. p.515; LRB. 47. Ibid. p.516 48. Ibid. p.516

21

49. Ibid. p.516 50. Chalmers-Mitchell, art. cit., p.10 51. Ibid. p.11 52. Arturo's meeting with lIsa 1S discussed ln greater detail 1n Chapter 6. 53. FR, p.530 54. FR, p.530; LRB. Aurelia was evidently a snob, who liked to imply she was connected to the Grimaldis of Monaco. 55. FR, p.530 56. Ibid. p.532 57. Ibid. p.613 58. Ibid. pp.649-50 59. Ibid. p.550 60. LRB. 61. After the Civil War (the exact date is not clear), Aurelia emigrated with the children to South America, probably to Chile. She had become involved in a religious sect, which presumably offered her some way out of the hardships of a single mother in post-war Spain. She wrote to Arturo at least once in the late 1940s (LRB). But there is no evidence that Arturo ever got in touch wi th her again. Aurelia remains the saddest figure in Barea's story: disliked by his sister, his mother, his nieces ("inculta y simple," according to his niece Maruja [Letter to me, Feb. '95]), his friends and by Arturo himself. The caricature (under the name of Luisa) he presented of her in La raiz rota has no redeeming features. 62. The general atmosphere of imminent death is best captured in Chapter XII of La llama, pp.642-654. See also the autobiographical chapter No. XIX in Valor y miedo, pp.112-116. This extract is from p.114: "Si entraran [los franquistas] en Madrid, si llegaran a esta Telefonica, ratonera de hierro y cemento, sin salida, situada en el camino de la invasion, los fusilarian a ella yael." 63. Telephone interview with Martha Gellhorn on August 16 th , 1990. Gellhorn herself (to her irri tation) makes a fleeting appearance in the trilogy, as a "figura elegante rematada por un halo de cabellos rubios" (FR, p.699). 64. FR, p.710, where Barea quotes from Dos Passos, John, Journey between wars (New York 1937). 65. Delmer, Sefton, Trail Sinister,

22

(London

1961), pp.295-296.

66. Gellhorn called the Florida the 'whorehouse hotel '. Hemingway punned that it was 'full of hors de combat'. (Gellhorn, 16/8/90). The atmosphere of press, Russian generals and prostitutes hob-nobbing there is described in Hemingway's The fifth column and For whom the bell tolls. 67. Interview with Martha Gellhorn, 16/8/90. 68. Ayala, Francisco, Recuerdos y Olvidos (Alianza Tres, Madrid 1988), p.237. 69. FR, p.716 70. The sources for the year which the Bareas spent in Paris are: the very last chapter of La llama, (FR, pp.781 ff.) i Barea's 1943 story A la derivai and Margaret Weeden's letters to me. 71. The break-through in Barea's writing during Summer 1938 in Paris is discussed at the beginning of Chapter 3. 72. Weeden, Margaret, 'The Forging of a Rebel,' In En Australia y en Nueva Zelandia, Canberra, October 1991.

23

CHAPTER TWO.

VALOR

Y

MIEDO

HEROISM.

- - PROPAGANDA

AND

PASSIVE

PUBLICATION. The precise reasons why Valor y miedo was even published remain unclear. On the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, only twelve books of fiction dealing with the war were published (1). Potential writers were busy fighting; the Government and parties were mainly engaged in disseminating propaganda, not encouraging fiction. Normal publishing business was disrupted.

Valor y miedo was accepted in Barcelona in February 1938, just before Barea left Spain, and came out in a small edition later that year

(2).

It is certain that the publishing house was

sponsored by the PCE or PSUC:

both because of its typical

Popular Front name (Publicaciones Antifascistas de Cataluna); and because the book came out at a stage in the war after the suppression of the POUM and the defeat of the anarchists.

This fact focuses the interesting question of the poli tical views contained in Valor y miedo. At the time of acceptance, Barea was about to leave the country after being squeezed out of his job in Madrid by PCE-backed interests. Moreover, his new wife lIsa had been subject to a smear campaign that she was a trotskyist,

which at

this

period in history was

often the

prelude to imprisonment or execution. Barea, therefore, in the weeks before leaving Barcelona for France, was in a delicate 24

situation (3). Despite all this, Valor y miedo was accepted by publishers sponsored by the PCE/PSUC! Why?

It is probable that

lIsa's husband Poldi

assisted in the book's

acceptance.

(Leopold Kulcsar)

Kulcsar was an Austrian

Communist Party official employed in Barcelona in the witch-hunt of the POUM (4). Kulcsar knew that lIsa was not a trotskyist; possibly (and this was Barea's stated view) his personal loyalty to lIsa, despite her leaving him, led him to support publication ( 5) •

Personal considerations apart,

Kulcsar would have understood

another factor: that the book's publication could well have the effect of stemming possible future cri ticisms of the PCE by Barea.

Without

both

lIsa's

and

Arturo's

public

silence

concerning their exclusion from power, they would not have been permitted to leave the country (6).

Whatever

the

specific reasons

for

publication,

the

general

reason is clear. Valor y miedo is a powerful piece of propaganda for the Republican side and faithfully reflects the ideology of the

PCE-PSOE

coalition

which

dominated

the

Popular

Front

Government in 1938.

As it happened, it was a book of little luck, swallowed up by the Republican defeat. Few copies were printed: and these at the high cost of 12 pesetas. Not many people read it (7).

25

At first glance,

it is strange that the book was never later

translated into English, nor apparently to any other language. Barea was popular enough in the 1940s to have found an English publisher for the stories. That he did not do so is perhaps part of his overall lack of interest in the fate of his own work (8). A more plausible reason, however, is that shortly after these stories'

publication

Barea

rejected

their

type

of

social

realism.

Proud as he was of his first book, he went through a fundamental change of approach to his writing in the summer of 1938, when he was gestating La forja de un rebelde: "En aquellas ruidosas tardes de verano cuando estaba solo entre extranjeros, me daba cuenta de que no podia escribir mas articulos ni mas historias de propaganda, sino dar forma y expresar mi vision de la vida de mi propio pueblo, y que para aclarar esta visi6n tenia primero que entender mi propia vida y mi propia mente." (9) As all he had previously wri tten was Valor y miedo, we must conclude he was referring to this book. Barea himself saw the stories as no more than historias de propaganda and for that reason never sought to have them reprinted or translated.

GENESIS.

In another sense,

though,

Valor y miedo did reach the mass

audience which Barea coveted: many of the pieces had started life as broadcasts on the radio. These broadcasts arose out of the circumstances of Barea's nervous breakdown in 1937, which was precipi ta ted by three succes s i ve blows during two days. First,

lIsa's room had been burnt out by a shell: she'd only 26

escaped by luck.

Secondly,

Barea tells us,

with one of his

descriptions of such literal vividness it provokes disgust: "Contra la luna estaba aplastado y aun contrayendose convulsivo un trozo de materia gris, del tamano del puno de un nino ... Un hilillo de sangre acuosa se deslizaba por el cristal abajo, surgiendo de la pella de sesos, con sus venillas rojas y azules, en la quel'os nervios rotos seguian agi tandose como finos latigos. No senti mas que estupor ... una piltrafa de un cerebro humano." (10) Barea

was

escorting

at a

that

very

delegation

moment of

on

English

the

surreal

women,

mission

including

of

Ellen

Wilkinson and the Duchess of Atholl, to see the uncouth General Miaja, and had to carryon as if nothing serious had happened.

The third shock occurred the very next day, when Barea saw three people killed in the street. He suffered a nervous collapse. For several

weeks,

he

was

feverish

and

retching,

unable

to

concentrate or sleep. He felt listless and depressed (11).

He tells us how he finally reacted: "Una particula de materia gris palpitante habia puesto en movimiento dentro de mi una cadena de pensamientos y emociones ocultos ... Yo queria gritar. Gritarles a ellos [los hombres y muj eres de Madrid] y al mundo entero sobre ellos. Si queria seguir luchando contra mis nervios y mi cabeza consciente sin descanso de mi y de los otros, tenia que hacer algo mas en esta guerra que simplemente vigilar la censura de las noticias para unos peri6dicos que cada dia eran mas indiferentes. Segui escribiendo y comence a hablar por radio." (12) Thus the inertia brought on by his breakdown was overcome. He tells us how he had to fight for permission to broadcast, both from Miaja and the Comite Obrero of the Ministerio de Propaganda (13); a victory which also signalled a general change of policy on the type of censorship employed (14).

21

In a eulogy to Barea, broadcast five days after his death, Emir Rodriguez Monegal eloquently -- albeit with some hyperbole explained what Barea's Madrid broadcasts came to mean: "Era una voz [la de Arturo Barea] que hablaba para llevar a los sitiados, luchadores y civiles que protegian con su fusil los muros de sus casas, 0 vecinas que continuaban la ardua tarea de vivir entre las ruinas, un mensaje de esperanza y un mensaje de lucha. Esa voz que llegaba a todos porque (a diferencia de otras voces ya ilustres de escritores espanoles) sabia hablar al pueblo con 'ese estilo crudo y desprevisto de florilegios de lenguaje' en que el mismo pueblo habla. En esa hora de Madrid, esa hora marcada por el reloj de la historia, Barea se convirti6 en la voz de los resistentes, y descubri6 al mismo tiempo su vocaci6n profunda de interprete." (15) Barea's radio broadcasts and his first writing -- the stories which became Valor y miedo -- had the same genesis. They were both produced in his struggle to overcome his nervous collapse. And he found the cure in telling true stories of working-class resistance to the working-class. The genesis of his writing was popular and collective.

Poli tical motivation was inseparable

from the start of his literature.

STALINIST IDEOLOGY.

Arturo Barea was later to dismiss Valor y miedo as 'historias de propaganda.' And many of his cri tics do not comment on the stories at all.

Barea' s

first cri tic in depth,

Marra-L6pez,

couldn't find a copy. Probably the same was true of Nora and Alborg, other critics of the late 1950s and early '60s who wrote on Barea's work (16).

Among those who read the book, there was a reluctance to call the contents 'stories'.

Maria Herrera, who has co-written the 28

only substantial commentary on the book, calls them 'cuentos escenas

de

guerra

(17).

And

Jaume

Pont

refers

to

0

them as

estampas (18). They are indeed little more than 'sketches,' not nearly as substantial as Barea's later stories collected in El

centro de la pista (19).

But this apparent deficiency is not so serious if we hold in mind the book's purpose, pointed out by Barea himself. Valor y

miedo is a work of political propaganda in fictionalised form. In that respect, it is very similar to works of 'social realist' writers of the period: such as Panait Istrati, widely published in Spain during the '30s,

or the Soviet writers who glorified

the achievements of the working-class In patriotic tones (20). Dos

Passos'

documentary

writing factual

of

the

1930s,

description

with

portray the working-class struggle,

where

he

fiction,

intersperses In

order

to

is also discernible as an

influence. The 'camera eye' technique employed to effect by Dos Passos is used in Valor y miedo (21).

Before looking at the more specific strengths and weaknesses of

Valor y miedo, it will be useful to look at just how the book reflected the prevailing ideology of Republican Spain in 19371938. For, unlike John Dos Passos' work, Barea's first book goes beyond

social

ideology,

i.e.

realism the

set

to

express of

a

ideas

particularly

developed

by

Stalinist the

Soviet

leadership in the mid-1930s to justify and explain their foreign policy. Here is not the place to explore the pros and cons of Soviet intervention in Spain (22). But we can note certain key themes of peE / USSR propaganda reflected in Valor y miedo.

29

I°rl~r:~~_ ")1,

I'

First and foremost is the idea of patriotism which is integral to many of the sketches, especially the first and last, thus enclosing the entire book in a veneer of patriotism: "Cayo en la trinchera enemiga con la navaja abierta. Con la navaj~ ?e lengua de vaca, con la cual tal vez un majo de 1808, destrlpo caballos de mamelucos de Napoleon. Con la navaja que, igual que hiciera un siglo antes, destripo moros y mas moros de los que llenaban la trinchera." (23) In

this

extract

from

La

tierra

Barea,

glorifying

Spanish

tradition and history, links the defence of Madrid against the fascists

to the struggle against Napoleon.

In doing so,

he

doesn't exalt the juntas populares of 1808 -- which would be extremely relevant to a revolutionary war; but uses language which evokes the alien nature of the opponents, mamelucos and moros. Barea's argument is the PCE's: true patriotism resided in

the 'people' not in the fascists.

The nationalist idea of a

popular defence of the 'patria' against external forces flows directly from the Stalinist idea of 'Socialism in one country,' which had replaced the revolutionary call for international revolution.

It was a theme easily displaced from the Soviet

context to Spain. It is no accident that the same theme comes to the fore again in Valor y miedo's final sketch: "Don Quijote y Sancho dan cara a la Casa de Campo; al Paseo de San Vicente por cuya cuesta un dia de noviembre de 1936 subieron los moros y los tanques alemanes." (24) The

statue

of

Cervantes'

heroes

lS

used

to

epitomise

the

resistance of Madrid. Here again Barea is not expressing the ideology of the class struggle, but of a national struggle of the Spanish people against foreign interlopers. And it involves a particularly reactionary emotive language: "destripo moros y , mas moros . . .".

30

A second theme reflecting Stalinist ideology which pervades Valor y miedo is encapsulated in this frequent use of the term moras. Although a typically popular way of speaking of Moroccans

and

Arabs,

it

lS

.

In

no

way

respectful.

In

using

moras

reiteratedly, Barea was quite happy to repeat general Republican propaganda in playing on popular fears

(25). The moros were

portrayed as rapists and castrators from Africa, once evicted from Spain, then colonised by Spain, and now in historic irony brought back by Franco to break the Republic.

Mora is a term Barea would have used from his childhood and

often occurs in La ruta, his book about Morocco. But during the war, his easy use of a pejorative term reflected a political choice and usage which falls wi thin the Stalinist framework. Barea is attempting to mobilise his readers, not on a socialist or anti-imperialist basis, but by appealing to a sense of nation ('patria') based on popular prejudice.

The third aspect of Stalinist ideology identifiable in Valor y miedo is that of a certain type of popular heroism, which can be

found in nearly every estampa. One of the clearest examples is Servicio de Noche, the story of Lolita who risked her life to

get the news out from the Telef6nica during an air raid. Another is Heroes, where, when the bombing starts, the young woman Julia invites people into her house with the words: "Miedo si, que deber ... Pasen, pasen, Mussolini." (26)

tengo. Pero me parece que tengo un esto es de piedra, garantizado contra

Without exception, these heroes and heroines are working-class. But their undoubted heroism is of a particular sort: a long-

31

suffering, resigned sort of endurance. Julia above says: tengo un deber'.

'que

Paco in La mosca says he understands nothing:

"[Paco tiene] una idea fija: matar fascistas." (27)

In these examples, Barea portrays the working-class protagonists as passive and patient:

doing her duty

(Julia),

stubbornly

fighting (Paco) or humorously powerless (Angel in the picaresque story of the same name). The strongest image of this passivity of the working-class in besieged Madrid occurs in Juguetes, where the idiot child continues to sell his trinkets in the Puerta del Sol, oblivious to the falling shells, and has to be led away by the narrator: "Mira alegre el idiota el billete, olvidado de su mercancia perdida y de los obuses que estallan." (28)

What is meant exactly by 'passive heroism' needs to be nuanced. In Heroes neither Julia nor her father are totally passive: they act. The soldier in Carabanchel who invents the stratagem of putting bed-frames over trenches so that shells bounce off the springs responds to the shelling with ingenuity. But the very slightness of what the heroes of these two sketches can achieve emphasises that they do not influence anything. They do not take their destiny in their hands. They are victims of circumstance: however they respond,

they have the passive resignation of

victims.

The soldier in Carabanchel is victimised by the dead donkey, rats and flies;

the peasants of Bombas en la huerta have to

watch helplessly the destruction of their irrigation system; in

Las botas, the soldier is tortured by his boots; Serafin in Los 32

chichones is tormented by his leaping up and banging his head

whenever he hears a shell.

This mood of resigned suffering has a lot to do with Barea's own cast of mind.

He was often sceptical about the efficacy of

political action and frequently pessimistic. We have seen above that he composed these sketches partly as therapy to stave off a nervous breakdown. Some critics, notably John Devlin and Jose Ortega,

argue

that

this

mood

of

Barea's

demonstrates

his

religious sensibility (29). The powerful sketch Refugio, which shows a priest arguing against the propertied classes, is some evidence in Valor y miedo of this religious sensibility for those who wish to find it (30).

However,

Barea's characters' passive and resigned heroism is

more an example of his political aims than of a pessimistic cast of mind or any supposed religious feeling. This resigned heroism is the core of the book's propaganda effect. And it dovetails precisely with the PCE's and Comintern's spreading of a view of the Spanish people (and in particular the besieged inhabitants of Madrid)

as

unfortunate

victims

of

working-class were not to be seen as

fascist

attack.

The

subj ects of their own

history, but dependent on the PCE and Comintern to defend them (31) .

This Vlew contradicted the self-organisation and self-activity of the working-class, which did explode in July and November 1936. These revolutionary mass mobilisations, which were on both occasions key to victory, were downplayed later by the PCE. In

33

Valor y miedo,

Barea does not show the workers engaging ln

political discussion, nor in collective action to decide their fates.

As

such,

falsification

Valor

of what

y

was

miedo

contributes

really happening.

to

a

And

Stalinist so,

quite

contrary to Barea's express aim, some parts of the book suggest a stoic defeatism (32).

In La llama, as argued in Chapter 6, and Lorca, Barea was to portray this period more truthfully.

But Valor y miedo, written

in the heat of the war, shows Barea's mental subservience at the time to the Stalinist framework (33). On the whole, the stories work as excellent pieces of this type of propaganda,

which

Leopold Kulcsar, the publishers, the Popular Front Government and Barea himself all wished to promote.

COURAGE AND FEAR.

Valor y miedo, of course, should not be reduced solely to these social and political dimensions. The book's central theme is summarised

ln

the

title:

'Courage

and

Fear'.

Jaume

Pont

explained: "El 'valor' y el 'miedo' conforman el entramado psico16gico de los cuentos de Barea. Esta, y no otra ... es su raigambre personal: la muerte como espectaculo diario y cotidiano, como depredadora fisica y alimento mental del inconsciente colectivo." (34) And in La llama, Barea wrote of his broadcasts: "Creia y creo que todas aquellas historias ... eran historias de un pueblo viviendo en aquella mezcla de miedo y valor que llenaba las calles y las trincheras de Madrid. Compartia todos sus miedos, y su valor me servia de alivio. Tenia que vocearlo." (35)

34

Only

of the twenty sketches of Valor y miedo are actually

SlX

situated at the Front. Thirteen more are placed in various parts of Madrid, usually defined by name. Thus the subject is the fear and courage of those who were closely involved in the war but were not regular soldiers. Barea's idea of war was decidedly anti-heroic: he could recall the repulsive and demented courage of Millan Astray haranguing starving conscripts in Morocco (36). Barea's

heroes

and

refugee

peasantry

heroines who

had

are

the

flooded

working-class into

Madrid.

and

the

Like

the

conscripts in the Moroccan war, they found themselves largely through circumstance in the army. No general appears in these stories; and even the captain who appears in two is 'tu' to his soldiers.

All these people's courage is improvised, arising from normal fear on being confronted with an extreme situation: all the more extreme because houses

crashing

battle-field,

the

shellings,

down,

but in the

are

the people blown apart,

not

happening

on

a

the

separate

streets and places where they are

living their lives.

BAREA'S OWN FEAR ... AND OTHERS' FEAR.

The narrator, Arturo Barea, is one of these people. It is his own

fear

and

reactions

which

he

examines

in many

of

the

sketches. Ortega suggests that: "Dos temas predominan en Valor y Miedo: a. la fe del pueblo madrileno en los ideales que defendian; b. el miedo de Barea por los bombardeos, forma de destrucci6n que le obsesiona y aterroriza" (37) 35

Barea expresses these feelings in the sketch Piso trece: :Me he pe~ado a ~stos ojos del tel~metro, prolongaci6n de los mlOS, fasclnado, lncapaz de moverme del sitio, viendo las nubecitas del humo del canon, oyendo silbar el obus segundos despu~s y sintien~o sus explosiones en la calle, en las fachadas, en los te]ados alrededor, oyendo vibrar los cristales y las columnas, temblar el piso, llenarse el sa16n inmenso de ruidos, de gritos, de polvo y de humo. Pensando que me miran a mi, que me disparan a mi, que viene a mi por el aire el obus, que va a penetrar por el ocular del telemetro, va a recorrer el camino tortuoso de prismas y va a entrar en mi cerebro por mis ojos y va a estallar aqui, dentro de mi craneo." (38) Barea cannot tear himself away from looking directly at his own possible death. Immobilised like a rabbit In a headlamp, he is unable to run down the stairs as he wants to do.

Barea describes another instance of his terror in Esperanza, where, on a terrible night in November 1936, he and Ilsa waited in the Telef6nica, unable to sleep because of the shelling. They heard the tanks' caterpillars screeching In the streets. They believed the fascists were entering the ci ty and they would therefore be shot: "Se cogieron del brazo inconscientemente y comenzaron a hablar bajito. Se explicaban el uno al otro sus angustias y sus ansias, lisamente con una franqueza primitiva, ensenandose mutuamente sus ilusiones y su fe". (39) In both these passages above,

the narrator is describing the

reactions and experiences of a non-combatant, having to await passively his fate. In the first quote he freezes; but in the second

human

solidarity

arises

from

the

fear.

In

this

solidarity, as in Refugio, Barea finds hope -- the Esperanza of the title.

It was Barea's own fear, therefore, which helped him understand and illustrate with sympathy the fear of others. Barea presents us with several different forms of this fear: 36

a)

In Conac,

Don Manuel

lS

repeatedly woken at night by the

shelling (40). Terrified, he takes to drinking brandy in secret. Turned into an alcoholic who bores mili tiamen on leave wi th tales of the Cuban War, he bears the guilt of hating his wife for her ability to sleep.

Cofiac

is one of the few estampas that really does become a

story. It is reminiscent of Hemingway's style, though Hemingway would not have mentioned at all the real 'sub-story' of fear that underlies the description of Don Manuel's night. Barea turns

an

anecdote

into

a

well-rounded

story

with

the

psychological insight of how Don Manuel comes to hate his wife because of his inabili ty ei ther to admi t his fear or to act agains t i t ( 41) .

b)

In Servicio de noche,

fear

is treated differently

(42).

Lolita the telephone girl acts to conquer her terror. Like Barea himself,

she's

non-combatant.

not When

a

front-line

everyone

else

soldier, lS

but

taking

a

combative

refuge

in the

bomb-shelters, Lolita returns to her work: "Los junkers, van y vienen, suben y bajan. Parece que envuelven la Telef6nica. Saltan las ventanas en cachos. Entran oleadas de humo acre que invaden, lentas, la sala. Se interrumpe la conferencia con Paris. Lolita estal16 en gritos de llamada a la Central parisina, gritos estridentes, con los ojos llenos de lagrimas. Apretaba con sus manos los auriculares puestos. Pensaba que era preciso que el mundo supiera en el acto 10 que pasaba en Madrid. Temblaba de miedo. Se reanud6 la conferencia con la 'International News Service. ' " (43) The story ends there. Lolita has displayed courage by doing her duty, precisely when she was trembling with fear. Unlike Don Manuel,

she does not attempt to conceal her fear; 37

and,

also

unlike him, the importance of the cause she believes in enables her to rise above herself. It is a story in the heroic tradition of Soviet social realism: it could have been one of Ehrenburg's dispatches to Pravda.

c) In Los chichones, as in Las botas, Barea treats fear with rough humour (44). What threatens during the first half to be a tale condemning the bar-owner Serafin's fear,

ends up as a

shared understanding that Serafin cannot help bumping his head whenever he wakes up in terror of the shells. " 'Tiene miedo cuando esta dormido, pero cuando esta despierto se 10 aguanta. Yo a esto si llamo ser un valiente. '" (45) Those who had at first laughed at Serafin's bumps end up ashamed of themselves. Fear is everywhere, the story tells us. A common recognition of its inevitability helps to deal with it. Whereas Don Manuel of Conac is a coward, Serafin's acceptance of fear turns him into a hero. Barea's model of a courageous hero is thus someone like Serafin and not the 'bridegrooms of death' of Millan Astray (46).

d) As a coda to this discussion of fear in Valor y miedo, it is relevant to comment on Barea's treatment of the same theme in the gloomy story Mister One, published in El centro de la pista (47). Barea wrote this story in April 1939, the month after the end of the Spanish Civil War and a very few weeks after his reaching refuge in England.

Mister One is a brief tale of Mister One, who every Saturday night silently drinks himself stupid, and the narrator's friend, Mister Two, who never drinks alcohol, but trembles and stutters 38

after too much coffee. In the First War, Mister Two had been a conscientious objector and emigrated to South Africa. Mister One went to the war. But now the sex and love life of both of them is plagued by guil t:

of desertion in the former's case and

participation in bloodshed in Mister One's.

The concreteness and brutali ty of Barea' s imagery makes the imaginative connection between sex (and peace) on the one hand and bloodshed on the other. Mister One is haunted by his killing of a German: "El aleman tenia los pechos como una mujer. El ruido de la bayoneta al salir no me deja dormir. Si me casara ... oiria este ruido en su pecho desnudo." (48) Barea is working out a syllogism: he does not give the men proper names and presents their different cases in sequence. He is examining, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, the effects of war on the involuntary participant. Mister Two is a deserter; Mister One, a soldier. They become friends because both have suffered the effects of war and are unable to lead a normal life as represented by their marrying the women they love.

Barea

neutral

lS

preferable.

as

to

Nor does he

whether

fighting

extend any hope

or

desertion

is

that the men will

resolve their problem. For Barea the fear of the person affected by war is not avoidable. In his own biography, we know that his love for

Ilsa,

her strength and his wri ting enabled him to

survive his fears.

Both Loli ta and Serafin,

as portrayed in

Valor y miedo, find ways to do the same. But, in Mister One, he envisages the despair of the millions defeated in Spain in 1939.

39

STYLE.

Some of the passages from Valor y miedo already quoted give some idea of the descriptive power and vividness, hallmark of Barea's best writing,

which was the

not only in this book but

throughout his career. It is important, in discussing his ideas, not to lose sight of the fact that Barea was not primarily an intellectual wri ter.

Even in this first propaganda book,

he

wrote about things he had seen, smelled, felt and touched (49). Barea's approach to events is raw and direct, unmediated by any distancing irony.

Jose Ortega wrote of the language of Valor y miedo: "[Es] .. . directo, calido." (50)

incluso

brutal

a

veces,

pero

slempre

This directness and brutality is conveyed by a particular style. Maria Herrera commented: "(Barea) logra una prosa conClsa y efectista, de ri tmo mon6tono y ralentizado, en la que las imagenes pasan ante el lector como en una pelicula muda, con un efecto de gran dramatismo". (51) Almost any narrative passage in the book could serve as an example. Here is the first paragraph of Sol, where the cinematic and monotone effects are enhanced by the historic present: "A las siete de la manana me despierta el sol. Comienza a inundar la habitaci6n y constituye una ducha de luz que obliga a tirarse de la cama. No entra directamente en mi cuartoi pega en el muro de enfrente de la calle y forma alIi un espejo que reverbera violento. Molesta casi mas que si diera directamente en los ojos". (52) On several occasions in Valor y miedo, the descriptions create a near-phantasmagoric, mesmeric atmosphere. And there are some parts of the book where the brutality goes beyond mere realism.

40

In Carabanchel, the longest sketch, a soldier finds himself in a trench with the rotting remains of a donkey built into the muddy wall in front of him. In three pages of sustained disgust, Barea tells us of the donkey's 'cuello flaco pustuloso'; 'las moscas verdes y gordas'; a rat 'grande como un gato pequeno, con un rabo nervino que se agitaba describiendo curvas como punta de latigo,'

which in his panic the soldier destroys;

then the

'piojo ... buscando el rinc6n donde se hincharia de sangre'. The louse is the final straw and the soldier ... 'sali6 corriendo por la trinchera como un loco'.

(53)

Described thus, the passage verges on the comic; but the power and

crudity,

achieved

by

short

sentences,

scenes

clearly

observed and the straightforwardness of presentation achieve an effect of horror and madness.

Barea,

therefore,

sometimes uses his descriptive abili ty not

just to show, but to shock. Professor Fernandez Gutierrez said with justice: "Muy bruto ... el mas bruto de nuestros escri tores".

(54)

At times, as in Carabanchel, Barea is not merely describing the rawness of what his senses perceive. So intense are the physical descriptions that he is able to express feelings of horror, disgust and fascination.

In La forja

de un rebelde he was to write other scenes of

gruesome death or disgust,

which he had witnessed from his

infancy

Barea' s

onwards.

Wi thin

accumulation of disquiet and horror.

41

social

realism

lS

an

It is no surprise that

Valor y miedo's composition served as therapy from a nervous breakdown brought on by the horrors of war. This strength of feeling gives the book an echo and power beyond most mundane works of social realism and propaganda.

POPULAR LANGUAGE AND NAMES.

In La llama Barea wrote of his radio broadcasts: "Mientras leia mi charla nocturna ... los hombres parecian sentir que ellos tenian una parte en 10 que yo decia, porque hablaba su mismo lenguaje, y cuando acababa se volvian criticos rigurosos de mi charla". (55) The audience played a direct part In the composi tion of the broadcasts and, by extension, in the sketches of Valor y miedo. This

aUdience's

discreet.

cri ticisms

Barea clearly,

and advice would not

have been

given his feeling of identity with

these representatives of popular Madrid,

strived to satisfy

their aspirations when he broadcast.

The origins of the sketches in this almost collective process influenced Barea's language. It contributed to the vividness of description we have noted,

to the human warmth that Ortega

refers to and also to Barea's use of popular language. Barea's dialogue and narrative are imbued with the rhythm and slang of the people of Madrid: "--2.T11, no habras oido misa, verdad? Pues, mira: alIi hay una 'ermita.' Cruzaron y entraron juntos en un tabernucho humilde. T11, danos gasolina para la cuesta. Se bebieron dos vasos de 'matarratas' ... " (56)

42

As well as slang,

the sketches are full of popular turns of

phrase, songs and piropos. These can be found opening the pages at random: "Si fuera hombre, la pateaba a esta tia bruja." "un pueblecillo." "y me dice muy c~ulo: -- Tu, pruebate un par, aunque a ti te faltan unos zepellnes ... Bueno, para saltarle el cuello 0 mentarle a la madre." "tios carca ... " (57) popular language brings the sketches to life. Barea had two potential audiences: the people of Madrid, for whom the slang made the broadcasts, and could have made the sketches if they had later read them, more familiar, more 'theirs' (58); and the outside world, whose support for besieged Madrid Barea sought. The 'localisation' to Madrid by a specific popular terminology made the propaganda of the sketches more effective.

Barea's practice of constantly naming places and people has a similar effect to the use of slang. The sketches are made more vivid by the use of place-names. We are told that Conac is set in a house on the Puerta del Sol; Los chichones in Serafin's bar and house; Sol in the Gran Via; Refugio by 'la esquina de la Calle de la Cruz'. Three sketches are simply named after areas of the city: Carabanche1,

Arguelles and Plaza de Espana. His

heroes and heroines are given solid, human form by being in, and belonging to, a particular place. It is Barea's way of saying: 'This is true. It happened here'.

The use of names also underlines the author's involvement. He tells us he has known the boy on the corner of Mayor and Correos all his life

(Juguetes).

Serafin and Paco

43

(Los chichones)

or

Sargento Angel (El sargento Angel) are all given depth by the author's involvement with them.

Significantly, the enemy is never named: they are 'moros' or 'alemanes'. Thus the enemy is dehumanised, as in the sarcastically-titled sketch Proeza: "El padre se llama: Raimundo Malanda Ruiz. La madre se llama: Librada Garcia del Pozo. Las ruinas de la casita herida por siete bombas, conserva aun el nlirnero 21 de la calle de Carlos Orioles en Vallecas. El avi6n era un trimotor junker aleman. Los asesinos, no tienen nombre." (59)

COURAGE IN HUMOUR.

There is a counter-balance to the terror and fear evoked in

Valor y miedo in the frequent humour of the characters and the ironies -- crude contrasts rather than subtleties -- which Barea draws out of the situations. In Las botas, for example, Barea creates the feeling that some ill-fitting boots are going to cause a tragedy. But against expectation the soldier removes the boots in time and assists in successfully repulsing an attack. In the middle of the story, the serious dilemma, with political overtones, is posed humorously: "Tenia miedo a los dos: a sus callos y a la maquina ... Parecia que se ponian de acuerdo, para martirizarle ... Pero, en fin, el miedo a la maquina era menor que el miedo a los callos. Una era la guerra, y era cuesti6n de suerte. Los otros eran unos verdugos que le martirizaban desde nino." (60) A story that threatened disaster ends lightly. Juguetes and Los

chichones also end more happily than Barea had allowed the reader to hope at the stories' start.

44

Barea uses humour to suggest that people can think and take decisions, despite their fear. As noted earlier in discussing

Los

chichones

political

Heroes,

and

events

is

not

impotence always

the

or case

passivity In

the

before smaller

questions. Within Carabanchel, the humorous use of a bed-frame to repulse shells offsets the horror of sharing a trench with a dead donkey.

The strongest example of humour as a companlon of courage and antidote to war and fear is shown by Sargento Angel at the end of the sketch of the same name. Angel invites his friend to punch him on the

jaw -- a Schweikian gesture!

comments ruefully on the war to that same friend: "Si esto se arreglara tambien a bofetadas." (61) ******************

45

and then

NOTES. 1. Tunon de Lara, Paloma. In: 'La Guerra Civil,' Historia 16 (Madrid 1985), Vol.17, p.91. The author lists 12 books In Castilian and 8 in Catalan. She excludes over 20 novelas rosas and 'las novelas cortas publicadas por La Novela Ideal, de matiz libertario, en Barcelona. ' 2. FR, p.794 ,

3. Ibid. pp. 762-775 4. Ibid. pp. 766-768 and Ayala, Francisco, Recuerdos y Olvidos (Madrid 1988), p.278. Ayala and Barea both portray Kulcsar sympathetically -- the former, because of his unhappy sudden death; the latter, because it was Kulcsar's strings that almost certainly got him an exit visa. In fact, despite his heroic role in the defeated uprising of February 1934 in Vienna, by the time he reached Spain, Leopold Kulcsar was a vicious Stalinist secret policeman. For more on this, see Chapter 6, Note 34. 5. FR, p. 765 6. Ibid. p. 755 7. I have been unable to find any details of Valor y miedo's publishers (Publicaciones Antifascistas de Catalufia) or printrun. Searches in Barcelona have been unable to unearth a 1938 first edition. 8. "[Arturo Barea] ... siempre pensaba reunir sus cuentos, al menos los que consideraba mejores, en un tomo, pero iba dej andolo de un dia para otro. No 10 hizo." Barea, lIsa, El centro de la pista (Badajoz 1988), prefacio, p.45. 9 . FR, p.786 10. FR, p.704 11. Ibid. p.711 12. Ibid. pp.715

&

717

13. Ibid. p.720 14. Ibid. p.722 15. Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, 'Arturo Barea, una voz, BBC Latinamerican Service transcript, broadcast at Arturo Barea's usual hour on 29/12/57. 16. de Nora, Eugenio, La novela espanola contemporanea, 1939 -1967, (Madrid 1970) . Alborg, Juan Luis, Hora actual de la novela espanola, (Madrid 1968), vol.II. Marra-Lopez, Jose, Narrativa espanola fuera de Espana (1939 - 1961) (Madrid 1963) . 46

El centro de la pista (Badajoz

17. Edited by Herrera, Maria, 1988), introduction, p.22.

18. Pont, Jaume, Valor y miedo (Barcelona 1984), preface, p.10. 19. It is obviously a subjective judgment that the contents of VM are 'sketches' rather than stories. The criteria for such an evaluation are that the sketches are short, anecdotal and often unresolved in their plot and theme. The clear exception is Conac, one of the subtler studies of VM. This story was later pub~ished in Penguin Parade 7, 1940, under the title Brandy, I belleve the only chapter from VM to be later published in English: a confirmation of the points made earlier in this chapter that Barea later rejected VM. 20. The twelve photographs and prints published in the first edition of VM confirm the propaganda intentions of VM. They are entirely within the salt-of-the-earth school of heroic workers and peasants. They are reproduced in: Fernandez Gutierrez, J.M' and Herrera Rodrigo, M., La narrativa de la guerra civil: Arturo Barea, (Barcelona 1988). This work is hereafter referred to as FG & HR. 21. The evolution of John Dos Passos was interesting, as he broke with the PCE line while in Spain and became sympathetic to the POUM. He was pushed toward his critical attitude, no doubt, by the sununary execution of a friend of his. (Knightley, Phillip. The first casualty (London 1989), p.214). Dos Passos was liked and respected by Barea (see FR, pp.709-710 and 748). 22. The question of the rightness, or otherwise, of Soviet policy in Spain and its precise relations with the PCE, has, of course, given rise to immense controversy and numerous books over the past 55 years. To start from the facts, avoiding both easy Stalin-bashing and succumbing to the Stalin propaganda machine, is vital. Today these facts are available in a number of publications. The works I have relied on, listed fully in the general bibliography, are those by E. H. Carr, Raymond Carr, Fernando Claudin, Burnett Bolloten and Pierre Broue. These establish that patriotism and national chauvinism were essential parts of the Comintern's post-1935 policies and part of the PCE's propaganda and Popular Front policy in Spain. See Chapter 6 for further discussion of the politics of the PCE. 23. VM, p.17 24. Ibid. p.117 25. For example, RegIer, Gustave, The owl of Minerva (London 1959) : "Miaja therefore 'held off the enemy with a strong fist and broke the black tide' -- so it was said ... Franco's Moors were on the verge of perpetrating unthinkable atrocities." (p.283). And:

"'The Moors slaughtered the lot ... those animals. '" (pp.287288) . 47

lJ"

"

OFBR~STl.

LIBRARy

26. VM, pp.101-103 27. Ibid. p.82 28. Ibid. p.64 29. Ortega, Jose. 'Arturo Barea, novelista espanol en busca de su identidad,' Symposium, Winter 1971, pp. 377 ff .. Devlin, John. Spanish Anticlericalism (New York 1966), Ch.4. Devlin, John. 'Arturo Barea and Jose Maria Gironella,' Hispania, XL1, 1958, pp.143-148. 30. The unnamed priest of Refugio is probably the same priest who played an important role in Arturo Barea's decision to leave Madrid in 1937, the famous Leocadio Lobo (FR, pp.750-755). There are a number of priests in the trilogy: the question of Barea's attitude to religion is discussed in Chapter 4.

31. Daily Worker and News Chronicle. Articles from the time. (British Library) . 32. As well as Barea's own testimony in the second part of La llama, see, for examples of demoralisation due to the Popular Front's policies, testimonies in Fraser, Ronald, Blood of Spain, (Allen Lane, London 1979), Bolloten, op.cit., or Casanova M., 'Spain betrayed' in The Spanish Ci vil War, the view from the left (Revolutionary History, London 1992) . 33. In La llama Barea shows how the Madrid working-class had taken matters into their hands and decided their destiny at these two crucial historical moments. The sharp contradiction between the honesty of his factual account and his very different ideas about those events is discussed in Chapter 6. After the war, Barea said: " . .. the night of the outbreak of Franco's rebellion, I witnessed one of the most stirring things I have ever seen: I saw and felt the force of spontaneous mass solidarity . .. We knew that we had not only to defeat Fascism, but also to carry through the revolution which would for ever free our Spain from the hands of a few masters." The Indivisibility of Freedom, Socialist Vanguard, (London, March 31, 1945). In other words, his later view, expressed in 1945 and in La llama, of a revolutionary upsurge is suppressed -- or, at least, not perceived -- in Valor y miedo. 34. VM, p.9 35. FR, p.725 36. FR, p.314 ff. 37. Ortega, art. cit .. 38. VM, p.107 39. Ibid. pp.114-5 40. Ibid. pp.24-28 48

41. Ibid. p.22 42. Ibid. pp.18-23 43. Ibid. pp.22-23 44. Like Servicio de noche, Los chichones is also mentioned in La llama. Los chichones is explicitly referred to as a radio broadcast. Barea says: "Serafin tenia un chich6n en la frente que nunca disminuia de tamano ni de color y que era la fuente de bromas inagotables: cada vez que en suenos brincaba por una explosi6n en la calle, se golpeaba con la cabeza contra el anaquel, y cada vez que saltaba de su cama para ir a la calle para ayudar en las ruinas dejadas por una bomba, se daba un segundo trastazo. Su miedo y su valentia, juntos, Ie mantenia el chich6n floreciente. conte esta historia en la radio." (FR, p.725) 45. VM, p.93 46. FR, p.314 ff. 47. CP, pp.73-76 48. Ibid. p. 75 49. cf FR, p.787: " .. . las cosas que habia olido, visto, palpado Y sen t'd l 0 ... " 50. Ortega, art. cit., p.390. 51. Herrera, Maria, CP, introduction, p.32. 52. VM, p.56 53. VM, pp.45-48 54. Interview wi th Professor Fernandez Gutierrez, 16/3/90.

Tarragona,

55. FR, p.726 56. VM, p.68 57. VM, pp. 96, 49, 50, 101, respectively. Barea was often criticised by Spanish critics for his use of slang (e.g. Nora and Alborg, op.cit.). FG & HR point out a number of misuses of Castilian by Barea: for example, "esto" for "eso"; the "la-ismo" and the "le-ismo"; omissions of "que"; wrong accenting; the elision of the "d" in the past participle; the use of an imperfect indicative rather than a past subjunctive, etc .. See Appendix 1 for more discussion on this. FG & HR speculate that these errors were caused by Barea's having worked in offices, where abbreviations were common, or by contamination due to foreign languages. In some instances, this may be so; but the more obvious explanation is that these are not faults at all, but an integral part of Barea's attempt to articulate popular language and mood (FG & HR, pp. 55-67). 49

58. Barea was aware that the people of Madrid never did read VM. He wrote of the summer of 1938, when he was in Paris: "Recibi un paquete de libros de Espana, Valor y miedo se habia publicado. Pero pense que los editores no podrian mandar ejemplares a Madrid, que era la cuna del libro: Madrid estaba cortado de Barcelona." (FR, p.794) 59. VM, p.35 60. Ibid. p.52 61. Ibid. p.77 ---------------------------

50

CHAPTER THREE.

MOVING BEYOND 'SURFACE REALISM'.

In

Paris

during

the

summer

of

1938,

Barea

came

to

this

conclusion: " ... no podia escribir mas articulos ni mas historias de propaganda." (1) It was a bold, risky decision, taken 'cuando estaba solo entre extranjeros,' a phrase which was to define Barea's life from then on (2). With this considered decision to put Valor y miedo behind him, Barea felt: "Yo habia perdido ya mi miedo de vol verme loco. Mi enfermedad habia sido miedo de destrucci6n y miedo de la lucha dentro de mi mismo." (3). During the year of insecurity and poverty Barea spent in Paris, en route from Spain to England, he found the way to overcome his physical and mental illness (4). Just as the broadcasting and writing which became Valor y miedo had allowed him to surmount his nervous collapse in May 1937,

so now Barea found a more

permanent remedy for the madness he feared: "Yo podria tambien abrirme mi propio camino a una claridad, y al fin podria ayudar a otros en su batalla, si lograba trazar mi enfermedad mental -- esta enfermedad que no era unicamente mia --, hasta sus raices mas profundas." (5) The search for his 'raices' was to be the way out of his mental illness: "Comence a escribir mi libro sobre el mundo de mi nifiez y juventud. Al principio yo queria titular LAS RAICES, Y describia en el las condiciones sociales ... al comienzo del siglo, en los pueblos y en los barrios pobres que yo habia conocido. Pero me encontre escribiendo demasiadas declaraciones y reflexiones, que creia necesario suprimir, porque no brotaban de mi propia experiencia ni de mi propio ser." (6) 51

Barea found that he was commenting and reflecting too much in his

narrative:

perhaps

he

was

still

thinking

of

making

propaganda, as in Valor y miedo. Then, he tells us, with the force of a moment of revelation: "Trate de limpiar la pizarra de mi mente, dejandola vacia de todo razonamiento y tratar [sic] de retroceder a mis origenes, a las cosas que habia olido, visto, palpado y sentido, y cuales de estas cosas me habian forjado con su impacto." (7) This is a crucial statement of Barea's method. He decided to try to record his childhood, without rationalising it with his later adul t

knowledge. He re-started the book,

uSlng the voice of

himself as a child to re-create the smells, sights and sounds of his world.

Barea told us that La forja took a long time to write because: " ... tenia que ahondar profundamente en mi mismo." (8) These are words more evocative of Proust as a master than of realists such as Dos Passos or Gald6s. But whereas Proust's aim was to evoke the nostalgia of an adul t examine

the

private

mores

of

high

reminiscing and to

society;

Barea

avoided

nostalgia by the technique of the child's voice and examined the common experiences of his generation.

In 1956, Barea replied to a question about the origins of La forja as follows:

"El choque de la Guerra Civil de Espana, el destino en Francia, expulsado por un lado y por el otro, me hizo echarme a la busca de cuales eran las razones porque los espanoles estabamos asi, y buscando ... a 10 mas lejano realmente al mismo hecho de nacer, y tuve que ... seguir de alli la raz6n de porque un espanol habia sido baqueteado de tal manera, como tantos millones." (9) His aim was dual:

both personal and general.

Throughout the

trilogy he never strayed from this double purpose. He wrote for

52

himself, as a way out of mental illness, as a way to understand his roots.

But he also wrote in order to understand what had

happened to the millions of Spaniards who had suffered the Civil War.

Thus, despite his sharp shift -- represented in the scrapping of a book he had already commenced -- away from 'declaraciones y reflexiones' in the style of a propagandist, Barea did not lose sight

of

how his

wri ting

could be

a

weapon

in

the

war

of

millions against poverty and hunger. He saw writing as a way of intervening in the struggle for

socialism at a time when he

could no longer be a militant.

The particular Vlew of realism that Barea developed is clarified by reference

to

three

of

his

cri tical

essays.

In

his

1941

article on For whom the bell tolls, Barea attempted to define a different

view of

realism from

that

of his

one-time mentor

Ernest Hemingway: "Some of the Castilian peasants Hemingway has created are real and alive ... Although all are magnificently described, in none of them has he touched the roots." (10) Barea goes on to question 'the quality of Hemingway's creative work in this

instance,

and the problem of his

realism as

a

whole.' He concludes: "Thus the inner failure of Hemingway's novel -- its failure to render the reality of the Spanish War in imaginative writing seems to me due to the fact that he was always a spectator who wanted to be an actor, and who wanted to write as if he were an actor. Yet it is not enough to look on: to write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living." (11) This is indeed attacking Hemingway on Hemingway's own terrain, for the American fervently held that a writer had to experience,

53

as well as observe, his subject-matter. Barea argued that the false note in For whom the bell tolls was due to Hemingway's not having lived and felt the lives of the Spanish working-class and peasantry he was writing about. But he was also suggesting, a more general point,

that Hemingway's

'close observation' was

insufficient, even if based on real experience (12).

Barea developed his view of realism further in a 1946 essay, where he criticised Pio Baroja's 'surface realism' (13) and went on to praise Ram6n G6mez de la Serna in the following terms: "In Spanish prose he [G6mez de la Serna] was the first to convey, rather than to describe or explain, a sense of complexi ty and insecuri ty, of 'things below the surface of things' ." ( 14 ) Barea

added

that

the

upheavals

of

war

and

revolution

his

generation had lived through could not be sufficiently expressed by Baroja's

(or,

by

implication,

Hemingway's)

'dry surface

realism' (15). Detailed observation of the surface was necessary but insufficient.

Barea found a model in the prewar Ram6n J. Sender: " ... the first Spanish novelist who attempted to describe the new workers' movements from within ... The style Sender used to describe these violent problems was ... bizarre, harsh, full of images and lit by flashes of poetry." (16) Barea was never as ambi tious ,

innovative nor imaginative as

Sender. But Sender's early novels showed how to add an account of working-class li fe things seen'

'from wi thin'

to

'the grim reali ty of

( 17) .

It is legitimate to see in these essays Barea's own aims as he struggled

with

the

first

versions

54

of

La

forja

in

1938.

Hemingway's 'close observation' and Baroja's 'surface realism' were not enough, though they had been sufficient aesthetic tools for the propaganda sketches of Valor y miedo.

For La forja de un rebelde Barea required an approach to writing that he felt was more profound. This is in no way to suggest that Barea is a better writer than Hemingway or Baroja, but rather that he needed a realism which got under the surface of events. Hemingway's use of intense detailed surface observation to convey emotion was not something Barea could (or wanted to) imitate. Barea's widow later wrote, citing his own words: " ... Arturo tanto anhelaba como escri tor ... ser 'capaz de tocar las fuentes escondidas de las cosas. '" (18)

CRITICS Without exception, critics who have commented on Barea cite La forja de un rebelde as his best work. And most hold the first volume, La forja,

superior to the others. As a consequence of

the trilogy's curious publishing history, the English reaction came before the South American,

which in turn preceded the

Spanish. Typical comments from the time were: "A unique book, every word of which rings true".

(19)

The Economist highlighted 'spare, sinewy prose' (20). The T.L.S. talked of Barea's 'passionate sincerity ... partisanship without intellectual dishonesty or the distortion of truth'.

The

first

Spanish-language

critics

were

the

(21)

young

Mario

Benedetti, who in 1951 hailed La forja de un rebelde as 'este relato vivido,

eficaz'

(22),

and Emir Rodriguez Monegal, who 55

underlined the book's 'brutality and directness,' its 'sustained objectivity'

(23).

The first cri ticism from wi thin Spain was the 1952 essay by Francisco Yndurain, entitled 'Resentimiento espanol.' But even the politically hostile Yndurain accepted that: "Con todo 10 partidista que sea esta obra, tiene un afan de verdad y de buscar un sentido a la vida mas alla de la lucha." (24 )

Another Spanish critic, Eugenio de Nora, wrote a few years after Yndurain: "Hay paginas suyas (al menos y ante todo la casi totalidad de La forja) capaces de asegurarle un lugar cimero ... de gran narrador." (25) For Jose Marra-Lopez, Barea is 'esplendido y intuitivo' (26). In a generous, trail-blazing 1962 essay, Marra-Lopez concluded: "Es un escritor inolvidable de un par de libros. Con ellos se derramo total y maravillosamente ... Pero hay que maravillarse, una vez mas, ante La forja como muestra del halito vital con que periodicamente surgen algunas obras espanolas, humanas y populares, vivas, en el verdadero sentido de la palabra ... Y esto es 10 que cualquier escritor suena con alcanzar." (27) 'Inolvidable' the trilogy And today Barea' s work,

migh~

have been. But it was forgotten.

despite the 1990 television series,

remains an 'asignatura pendiente' (28). Nevertheless the trilogy was from the start a critical and commercial success both In Britain and Argentina; and in Spain, a critical success even In the eyes of his own opponents.

There

lS

too a

remarkable coincidence of cri tical opinion.

Nearly all the cri tics highlight both the book's warmth and passion and its author's sincerity and truthfulness. Normally the

quality

of

passion

might

56

be

counterposed

to

that

of

truthfulness; as partisanship may cut against objectivity. But Barea diverged from the view that truthful objectivity is only gained from the sidelines. He plunged emotionally into his story and succeeded in retaining his objectivity.

NOVEL OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

How should we perceive La forja de un rebelde, a work which lS the truthful story of the author's own life, yet has the ring of a novel? Nearly every novel is to a greater or lesser degree autobiographical. With Barea, however, it is not just a question of the use of autobiographical sources, but that he rigorously excludes any event he has not been involved in and writes in a non-fictional first person.

Several critics have spent time discussing whether the trilogy is

fiction

or

autobiography.

For

it

lS

neither

a

normal

fictionalised 'portrait of the artist when young'; nor is it a straightforward autobiography. Rodriguez Monegal pointed out: " ... aunque su autobiografia es un testimonio de primer orden, no es unicamente eso. La misma realidad aparece tratada por el autor por medio de una sensibilidad que selecciona y reacciona." (29) In other words, there lS a selection of material such as occurs In a novel. Rafael Conte put it elegantly, if rhetorically: "GSe trata de una novela 0 de una autobiografia? GQue importa? Es un relato excepcional, fuera del tiempo literario, de cualquier tendencia, corriente estetica, de cualquier influencia." (30)

57

'~Que

importa?', indeed. The work is there: look at the work!

Though Conte is wrong to deny the importance of the historical antecedents and social background of the trilogy, he justifiably mentions the uniqueness of Barea's work. In Spanish literature, there

are

very

few

precursors

In

the

field

of

the

autobiographical novel, and none like the trilogy. Jose Ortega followed a line developed forty years earlier by Madariaga in theorising on the Spanish character (31): "La autobiografia no es un genero muy cultivado en literatura espanola quiza por el miedo del espanol a la exposici6n abierta de su intimidad, de su individualidad por temor a perder su 'preciosa' unicidad." (32) Ortega goes on to argue of Unamuno's first novel Paz en la guerra:

"[Era una] ... novela hist6rica 0 historia novelada que inicia en las letras espanolas el movimiento de humanizaci6n mediante la proyecci6n personal ... La obsesi6n y yo intimo unamuniano adquiere en Barea un tono mas social a causa de las vicisitudes personales del autor y de la proximidad del hecho hist6rico que narra ... Arnbas novelas sirven ... para conocer la personalidad de sus autores, asi como la vida intima del pueblo espafiol." (33) Another critic Serrano Poncela talked of: " ... la inhibici6n hispanica ante toda apertura publica de las intimidades del yo, con el consiguiente rechazo a todo compromiso de autointerpretar su personalidad profunda." (34) Whatever truth these generalisations about the Spanish character contain, they do point to the originality of Barea's trilogy, where the author was brave enough to attempt to reveal his 'personalidad profunda. '

In this respect, despite Barea clearly being a social realist, the impact of modernism is not alien to his work,

as was

suggested above with the glancing reference to Proust. Barea chose not to tell things from an objective, all-seeing point of

58

view,

but

rather

to

filter

the world through a

subjective

consciousness. As such, he showed how the world affected his "I" and how his "I" acted on the world: he is able to transmit the particular

intensi ty of his

childhood memories.

Before the

revolution in the arts, represented in literature by Joyce and Proust, it is hard to imagine this psychological dimension which Barea added to social realism. His autobiographical novel would not have been possible 30 years before.

We

should

note

too

that

after

Barea's

book,

though

not

necessarily as a consequence of it, there have been far more autobiographical novels in Spanish. The shock of the Civil War jolted

numerous

writers

into

a

more

personal

and

autobiographical type of novel than before (35).

It is important however to emphasise that La forja de un rebelde lS

not a confessional work:

'confessing'

neither in the sense of Unamuno

to religious and existential doubt;

nor In the

sense of someone like Koestler 'confessing' to the reasons why he had supposed himself a Communist. Barea was interested in his own life for a clear purpose. Let Barea himself re-state the political motive of this dual aim: "The millions who shared the same experiences and disappointments do not usually write, but it is they who are the rank and file in wars, revolutions and 'New Orders' ... As I was one of them, I have attempted to be vocal on their behalf, not in the form of propaganda, but simply by giving my own truth." (36)

59

THOSE WHO HAVE NO VOICE. In the political dimension of his dual purpose,

Barea sounds

uncannily like his near-contemporary Victor Serge who wrote, as if in echo of the above quote: "El que habla, el que escribe es por encima de todo alguien que habla en nombre de todos aquellos que no tienen voz." (37) Victor Serge (1891-1947)

is both similar to and different from

Barea

ways.

in

illuminating

autobiographical

fiction

They

late,

both

started

to

write

when they were excluded from

political activity: Serge in 1929 because of internal exile in the Soviet Union, and Barea due to nervous breakdown and foreign exile. They both carried on what they conceived as a political struggle by recording their own experiences. They wrote about themselves in order to express the feelings and aspirations of silenced millions.

A key difference

lS

that the protagonist of most of Serge's

books is the workers' movement itself. Serge is a participating witness of events,

but as one of the mass. Barea's desire to

'autointerpretar su personalidad profunda' has no interest for Serge. Barea's protagonist is, of course, Barea: as such, his trilogy lacks the political breadth of Serge's trilogy (38).

But both writers believed that things were really like,'

In order to understand

they could not be detached:

'what

indeed,

they could not be objective unless they were actively involved in the events they were trying to understand (39).

60

OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY.

So

the

conscious

choice

which

Barea

made

to

particular blend of autobiography and fiction,

write

this

was a choice

conditioned by his personal and political situation and the aims he set himself. But Barea was also impelled by factors rooted in his own character and history.

From

early

childhood

Barea's

life

was

defined

by

his

, intermediate' posi tion in society. He lived between a slum attic with his mother and the middle-class apartment of his aunt and uncle. He played in the street with ragged children at the same time as he went to school on a scholarship. Later he was a member of the UGT while directing a factory. In the army, he was a sergeant: neither officer nor illiterate private. There are numerous examples of Barea's 'intermediate' or 'between-class' status, a position in society which he adopted almost without thinking at each stage of his life, after the die was cast by the childhood contradiction of garret and comfortable flat.

It can be argued that many intellectuals from a working-class background experienced a similar trajectory, especially before the general expansion of working-class education. Among writers, D.H.Lawrence

is

an

example

who

shows

alienation

from

his

background, yet identifies with it, in a similar way to Arturo Barea.

Lawrence,

like

Barea,

was

fiercely

independent

and

antagonistic to the intelligentsia; whereas by any objective cri teria of

life-style,

views

himself one of them.

61

or

source of

income,

he was

Barea's background gave him the vital gift for a writer of a 'double vision.

Discussing Scott Fi tzgerald,

Jay McInerney

defines Fitzgerald's double vision as: " ... viewing character and scene almost simultaneously from the inside and the outside." (40) In an image reminiscent of the young Arturo at the Cafe Espanol (41), McInerney writes: "[Fitzgerald's] ... narrators always seem to be a part of the festivities even as they shiver outside with their noses pressed up against the glass."(42)

It is this 'double vision' which defines Barea's unflinching eye, his ability to lromerse himself and the reader in the world of the child of La forja and yet at the very same time to observe that boy from the outside. To say solely that Barea lived in an 'intermediate' position in society, could wrongly imply that he was not involved. On the contrary, he experienced deeply both sides of the class contradictions which started in his infancy.

Barea's is an unwavering objectivity, based on knowledge gained from totally subjective immersion. Barea does not falter into either breast-beating ('Oh what a bad boy I was'), nor special pleading ('Look what a terrible time I've had'), nor rose-tinted colouring

(omission

of

things

which

reflect

badly

on

the

author). Joan Gili described Barea's eye as a 'camera eye' (43). Yet at the same time as the reader of La forja sees events through that objective, cinematic prism, he/she is drawn inside the writer's subjective world by the childlike narrative VOlce.

62

Such an imaginative gift is what gives depth and dimension to Barea's trilogy_ The world the reader enters is both a real, accessible, objective, non-private world, and also the author's profoundly subjective and private reality. This double vision is what enables the circle of 'passionate' and 'objective' to be squared.

********************

63

NOTES. 1. FR, p.788 2. Ibid. p.786 3. Ibid. p.785 4. Arturo and lIsa Barea's stay in Paris is described at the end of La llama and also fictionally evoked in A la deriva, a short story finished in 1943 and published in El centro de la pista.

5. FR, pp. 785-786 6. Ibid. p.787

7. Ibid. p.787 8 . Ibid. p.788 9. Cordoba tape. See Appendix 5. 10. Barea, Arturo, 'Not Spain but Hemingway,' Horizon, 1941) pp. 350-361.

(London

11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Barea, Arturo, 'New writing in Franco Spain,' London Forum, (Winter 1946), Vol.1 No.1, p.67. 14. Barea, Arturo, 'A quarter century of Spanish writing,' Books Abroad, (Spring, 1953), Vol. xxvii, p.123. 15. Art cit. in Note 13. 16. Art. cit. in Note 14. 17. Ibid. 18. Barea, lIsa, El centro de la pista, prefacio, p.45. 19. The Times, March 1946. 20. The Economist, July 1941. 21. The T.L.S., 23.3.46. edition of The Clash) .

(Cited on back cover of

Flamingo

22. Benedetti, Mario, 'EI testimonio de Arturo Barea,' Numero, (Montevideo 1951), Vol. III, pp. 374-381. 23. Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, Supplement, 2/5/52.

'Mask of realism,' Times Literary

64

24. Yndurain, Francisco, 'Resentimiento espanol. Arturo Barea, ' Arbor, (Madrid, enero 1953), vol. xxiv, pp.73-79. 25. de Nora, Eugenio, op.cit., vol. III, p.62. 26. Marra-L6pez, Jose R., op.cit., p.292. 27. Ibid. p.339. 28. Gimenez-Frontin, Jose-Luis, 'Arturo Barea, una asignatura pendiente,' La Vanguardia, (Barcelona), 8/5/86. 29. Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, Tres testigos espafioles de la guerra civil, (Revista Nacional de Cultura, Caracas 1967), p.13. 30. Conte, Rafael, Narraciones de la Espafia desterrada, (Barcelona 1970), p.37. (As cited in FG y HR, p.92) 31. Madariaga, Salvador, Spain,

(Cape, London 1942).

32. Ortega, Jose, 'Arturo Barea, novelista espanol en busca de su identidad,' Symposium (New York winter 1971) p. 387. 33. Ibid. pp.387-388. 34. Serrano Poncela, Segundo, 'La novela espanola contemporanea,' La Torre, 2, (Puerto Rico 1953), p.108 (Cited in Ortega, art. ci t ., p. 391) . 35. There are a great many of these autobiographical novels. The most famous are Ram6n Sender's Cr6nica del Alba, Jose Maria Gironella's Los cipreses creen en Dios, Carmen Laforet's Nada (about which Barea wrote in 'New writing in Franco Spain' in New Forum, London 1946) and the work of Max Aub. A later generation is still more at home with the autobiographical novel, or novelised autobiography. There are numerous examples, from Juan Goytisolo's Sefias de identidad to Francisco Umbral' s Memorias de un nifio de derechas and Jorge Semprun's La autobiografia de Federico Sanchez. 36. Barea, Arturo, The Track, p.8. This introduction has never been published in any Spanish-language edition of La ruta. The three-page introduction to the English edition serves as Barea's most articulate and condensed 'Credo'. 37. Serge, Victor, Carnets, quoted in: ed. Richard Greeman, Serge, V., Birth of our power (London 1977), appendix, p.283. 38. Victor Serge's Birth of our power Revolution (London French in the early

trilogy is: Conquered City (London 1976), (London 1977) and Year One of the Russian 1978). They were originally published in 1930s.

39. Serge, V., op.cit. in Note 37, p.284. 40. Mcinerney, Jay, 'Fitzgerald revisited,' New York Review of Books, 15/8/91, p.26. 65

41. FR, pp.21-29 42. Mcinerney, art. cit., p.26. 43. Letter to me from Joan Gili, 6/3/90. ----------------------------

66

CHAPTER FOUR.

THE CHILD'S EYE: LA FORJA. The

first

volume

of

the

trilogy,

valioso, mas afortunado de Barea,'

La lS

forja,

'el

libro mas

divided into two parts

(1). The first contains ten chapters, all but one of which are named after concrete places and express the disparate influences on the child, Arturo. This structure highlights the multiple contradictions of Barea's childhood. Thus the untitled first chapter

sets

the

middle-class world.

working-class

context;

the

second,

the

We are taken then from the city to the

country. Within the country chapters, the dry country of Brunete ('Tierra de pan') is contrasted with the wet fertile lands round Mentrida ('Tierra de vino').

The second half of the volume is organised in a more linear manner round the crucial events of Barea' s adolescence:

the

death of his uncle and its consequences for his hopes of a career; his beginning to work and the experiences which led to his joining the UGT; all brought together in the last chapter, Rebelde.

CHILD'S EYE.

An examination of the first two pages of the volume show Barea's technique, style and themes. The well-known opening paragraph plunges the reader straight into the book's atmosphere: 67

"Los doscientos pantalones se llenan de viento y se inflan. Me parecen hombres gordos con cabeza, que se balancean colgados de las cuerdas del tendedero. Los chicos corremos entre las hileras de pantalones blancos y repartimos azotazos sobre los traseros hinchados. La senora Encarna corre detras de nosotros con la pala de madera con que golpea la ropa sucia para que escurra la pringue. Nos refugiamos en el laberinto de calles que forman las cuatrocientas sabanas hfunedas. A veces consigue alcanzar a alguno; los demas comenzamos a tirar pellas de barro a los pantalones. Les quedan manchas, como si se hubieran ensuciado en ellos, y pensamos en los azotes que van a dar por cochino al dueno." (2) These vivid images take us with cinematic directness into a child's world:

the street-urchin game,

speculation on soiled

linen, the washerwoman with a stick. This opening is typical of how Barea

gives

the

reader

information

to

understand

the

si tuation,

wi thout explici tly explaining anything beyond the

child's perception of reality (3).

This

child' s-eye

functions.

Most

Vlew

can be

immediately,

broken as

In

down the

into

first

three main chapters

of

Dickens' David Copperfield, the child's eye and voice express the freshness of a world seen for the first time.

Secondly,

the technique allows Barea to place very different

worlds alongside each other, without moral value being placed on them. An example occurs on the second page, where the innocence of the child leads him to perceive the young Prince in the same terms as himself and his ragged friends: " [El principe] ... se pasea en la Casa de Campo entre un cura y un general con bigotes blancos, que Ie acompanan todos los dias. Estaria mejor aqui, en el rio, jugando con nosotros ... El tio Granizo ... luego nos dijo que el general no Ie dejaba." (4)

The third aspect of the child's-eye Vlew is that it allows Barea to demonstrate with conviction an optimistic attitude to the 68

world, an 'esperanza del futuro'

(5). The characters defined in

the opening chapters are poor, but not drawn as miserable. This might seem a rose-tinted view of the happy poor; but Barea avoids

this

trap

precisely by

employing

the

immediacy and

innocence of the child's voice and eye (6).

With this immediacy, Barea achieves the extremely hard narrative challenge of portraying his characters' lives, as if from the inside. Thus he is able to make the social points he wants to without explicit authorial comment. One of countless examples occurs on the second page: "Como somos chicos y no podemos ser anarquistas, los guardias nos dejan en el puente cuando pasan [la reina y los principes] . No nos asustan los soldados de la escolta a caballo, porque estamos hartos de ver sus pantalones." (7) The trousers are of course those of the first paragraph quoted above, and which his mother washes for a living. Barea both lets us know that anarchists are the talk of the town (how else could a child have heard of them?) and contrasts the royal family with his

own

life.

We

as

adult

readers

gain

background

and

information, without Barea having to lose narrative flow and power by abandoning the child's viewpoint.

After the poignant image of the prince, 'un nino rubio con ojos azules ... poniendo cara de bobo, , (8) riding past and laughing in his carriage, the direct association of the child's mind is used to take us into his uncle's more prosperous world, where with maximum economy Barea signals the young Arturo's affectionate relationship with his uncle and his early interest in politics and reading:

69

"Me suelo sentar entre las piernas de mi tio y ellos charlan de politica y de la guerra de los rusos y los j aponeses ... los escucho ... tengo una rabia loca a los rusos. Tienen un rey muy bestia que es el zar y un jefe de policia que se llama Petroff ... Todos los domingos, mi tio me compra las Aventuras del Capitan Petroff. Le tiran muchas bombas, pero no 1e mat an." ( 9 ) In a final example taken from these two opening pages, the child talks of the prince: "El cura Ie ensefia a hablar. Esto no 10 entiendo, porque si es mudo, no se como va a hablar; puede que hable por ser principe, porque de los mudos que conozco ninguno habla mas que por sefias y no sera por falta de curas." (10) In these four lines, heard from adul ts

the child first asserts a point he has

(' El cura Ie ensefia a hablar'); but wi th

dogged curiosity questions the point ('si es mudo, no se como va a hablar'); and in questioning it, tells us, as if in passing, that there is more than one dumb child in the streets weal thier,

less street-based world,

(in a

a child wouldn't know so

many people with handicaps) and a large number of priests.

In these first two pages,

therefore,

children playing in the washing,

three quick scenes

the prince passing by,

(the the

child at his uncle's) are sketched; and, hardly perceptibly, the maj or

themes

Barea will

develop

have

been planted in

the

reader's mind.

These opening two pages -- which could just as easily be many other pairs of pages -- suggest the density and richness of the book. But they also serve to emphasise that Arturo Barea was a much more

organised

and

careful

writer

than

his

frequent

crudities of style and harshness of subject-matter have led many critics to assert.

70

THE CHILD'S TWO LIVES.

In the first two chapters, Barea develops the contrast between his

two

lives.

He

tells

us

about

the

representative

of

restriction and religious repression, Aunt Baldomera: " ... aunque mi tio es muy bueno, mi tia es una vieja beata muy grunona que no me deja en paz." (11) The young Arturo prefers life in the streets and his mother's buhardilla,

where prayer

is

not

obligatory.

The narrator's

optimism and energy, which carry the reader through the volume, come from the sense of freedom, so sharply contrasted with the stale, confined world of Baldomera's flat. In this extract, the young Arturo slips away from the staid family table in the Cafe Espanol in order to play: " ... me voy con Esperanza, que esta ya detras de mi silla, tirandome pellizcos para que nos vayamos a jugar ... Nos ponemos de pie en los divanes y asomamos la cara a los espejos de la pared ... empezamos a dar palmadas para quitar las manchas (de sus pies) y salen nubes de polvo ... en el terciopelo rojo." (12)

Mario Benedetti wrote in 1951: " ... 10s tres grandes Espana y el amor." (13 )

temas

de Barea son:

la infancia,

Barea's reverence, none the less strong for being conventional, towards his self-sacrificing mother and his loving evocation of Lavapies show the accuracy of the above view. Benedetti goes on to remark: es el "EI poderoso atractivo de estos temas desacomadamiento del autor al enfrentarlos, la marcha a contrapelo de la costumbre, su cada vez mas obstinada independencia de criterio." (14) Thus, already in these first chapters,

conflicts between his

mother and aunt, between the streets and the cafe define the young Arturo's

life.

As was argued in Chapter 3 concerning 71

Barea's intermediate position in society,

it is not the fact

that he is apart from both worlds, but that he enters fully into two irreconcilable (or only temporarily reconcilable) worlds, which plunges him into even greater conflict.

Nor is it a simple counter-position of good and evil that Barea sets up. Benedetti refers to his doble insumisi6n

(15).

So,

Arturo rejects his aunt's world for the freedom of the streets and his mother's love. But he also rejects both the streets, realising he must get an education, and his immediate family, where his sister Concha attacks him for being a senorito and resents his privilege at her expense (16).

This doble insumisi6n is therefore a rejection of everything! The reader is taken inside the child's various worlds,

the

different layers and classes within society. The child's eye and voice permit Barea both to infuse the text with hope, optimism and passion

for

life,

and at

the

same

time

lay bare

the

cornplexi ty and mul tiple contradictions in the young Arturo's life. Torn, he enters full-bloodedly into everything and rejects everything, as he searches for his own independent criterion.

THE FORGE IN THE COUNTRY.

Like many a good novelist, Barea sets his scene, stimulating the reader's appetite, and then abruptly changes direction. After the first two chapters, the narrative of La forja leaves Madrid and takes us into the older world of three nearby villages:

72

Brunete,

Mentrida and Navalcarnero.

The first was to become

sadly renowned for its total destruction in 1937, which gives added poignancy to Barea's elegiac descriptions. It is typical of the trilogy that themes are deepened and given resonance by association of details back and forth through the three volumes in this

case,

several hundred pages

later,

where Barea

comments: "AlIi detras de aquella nube negra, llena de relampagos, Brunete estaba siendo asesinado por los tanques llenos de ruidos de hierros, por las bombas llenas de gritos delirantes ... Todo esto me parecia un simbolo de nuestra guerra: el pueblo perdido haciendo historia con su destrucci6n ... " (17)

In the three country chapters of La forja,

especially when

talking about Mentrida, Barea achieves most intensely another sort of 'double vision': the people and places are there before us, new and fresh in the eyes of the child; and at the same time the chapters are full of nostalgia for an irrecoverable world. They are undoubtedly the

lyrical high-point of all Barea' s

writing. In the words of one critic: "Hay tanta minuciosidad en los retratos y en las descripciones, que los parrafos se alargan sin remedio ... El efecto magico 10 consigue casi siempre el lenguaje: infantil, elemental y primi ti vo, pero tremendamente sugesti vo y suger idor ." ( 18 ) In his 1953 essay on Cela, Barea wrote: "Like other Spanish writers from Miguel de Unamuno down, Cela seems incapable of finding unspoilt, genuine and strong people anywhere else than in the immutable hills and plains, least of all in Madrid." (19) Though Barea does not share the cynical tone of La colmena and was capable of finding 'unspoilt, genuine and strong people' in the ci ty,

Barea also

'escaped into a static world' of rural

dignity from the 'depressing ugliness' of Madrid (20). 73

Along with the tone of elegiac loss, Barea is recording social history in these country chapters. He explains wi th careful detail how things used to be, defining the different kinds of people and meticulously naming places: "El coche sale de la Cava Baja, de una posada muy antigua que se llama de San Andres" (21). Thus these lyrical chapters are also the most castumbrista of Barea's work -- in the sense of capturing the atmosphere and recording the customs of a particular place and time. The pace of the narrative slows and the paragraphs lengthen, as he enters into the minutiae of the scenes. And at one point, he departs from

the

child's

VOlce,

in

order

to

underline

the

lost

uniqueness of what the boy had known: "Cuando yo era nino, era para mi motivo de asombro ver estos labriegos, sentados a la mesa de encina, con el jarro de flores azules de Talavera lleno de vino, desliarse la faja, dejando sus calzones caidos; desatar el nudo que encerraba el tesoro; deshacer las vueltas del cordel; y arrancar con sus unas los nudos finales para volcar sobre la mesa el importe de la transacci6n." (22) The three villages are not uniform. There are contradictions between them,

and even within the magical cornucopia that is

Mentrida, the young Arturo suffers isolation. He is bored and again suffers

the

resentment of his

relatives

for being a

senorita. It is a tag to which he always reacts angrily and from which he will never escape. A Spanish critic, Juan Luis Alborg, wielded these incidents against Barea: "Hayen muchos episodios ... una soberbia al tanera, proyect~da sobre sus familiares, que nada justifica de su posterlor rebeldia social. Mas aun: que nada tiene que ver con ella." (23) The young Arturo lS indeed a prickly child, who flares up easily at imagined or real insult. But Alborg misreads the events of La [orja. Barea leads us carefully through the stages of the young

74

Arturo's development. We are shown how it is the very conditions of his life -- for example, being dressed by Aunt Baldomera in a sailor suit when his friends and siblings wear rags -- that cause his conflicts.

It is because of these condi tions,

and

Arturo's

submit

the

refusal

to

neither

to

taunts

nor

to

sailor-suit, that the child reacts. It is true that there is 'soberbia

al tanera '

in

these

reactions,

which make

him an

instantly recognisable type of Spanish individualist. But it is not correct to say, as Alborg does, that this haughtiness has nothing to do with his social rebelliousness. Both pride and rebelliousness

stem

from

the

conflict

and

contradictions

described.

In the other non-lyrical aspect of these chapters, Barea takes great pains to explain the origins of his uncle's wealth. He introduces Luis Bahia the money-lender: a figure who presages the

usurer

of

Noves,

Heliodoro,

portrayed

in

the

opening

chapters of La llama or the cacique of his 1947 story, Aqua bajo el puente (see Chapter 8) . Barea is too conscious a writer to be

carried away by false nostalgia or his own lyrical gifts. In also showing the economical relationships in the villages, he kept firm rein on his dual purpose: to uncover, in himself and in Spanish society, the factors underlying the Civil War.

Of the two villages which Barea contrasts in most detail, the first is Brunete: "[La gente] ... come una cebolla con pan por las mananas cuando se van al campo, un gazpacho al mediodia y la olla por la noche, pero hecha s610 con garbanzos y un cacho de tocino." (24)

75

The

second

Brunete,

lS

there

Mentrida, the

lS

abundant spectacle

and of

sensuous. the

Whereas

degrading

in

village

bull-fight; in Mentrida, the fiesta is relaxed. In Brunete, the adults kill bulls and the child plays by tearing the wings off flies; but in Mentrida

'verde de arboles y verde de huertas'

-- families lie around idyllically in the grass and couples slip away into the bushes (25).

In Mentrida Arturo can lose himself and submerge his ego of the spoilt Madrid child: "Se que ahora no existo para nadie ... pero no me aburro nunca." (26) The family is all working. He fits In, both left to his own devices and accepted: he is happy. Only working flat out in the siege of Madrid 30 years later was Arturo able to lose again his sense of apartness and ego.

In Mentrida the child's older relatives take on the forms of archetypal figures.

His Uncle Luis,

the blacksmith, eats and

drinks massively and inspires Arturo with his desire to be an engineer.

In Luis's forge,

resonant of the book's title,

an

lmage of work and health, which Arturo will carry forward with him,

is

created.

Another

character,

his

great-grandmother

Eustaquia, is 100 years old, so spanning Spanish history back to the Napoleonic invasion.

Rich In archetypes and lyricism as the country chapters are, they nevertheless

show a

sophistication

in Barea' s

vision.

Simple counterpoint is rarely sufficient for him. The volume is not a romantic autobiography; nor is it a documentary account of 76

a typical childhood, with the concomitant ideology that he was defined and created by environment alone.

The movement in the book stems from Barea's showing the world coming

to

life

through

the

consciousness

of

a

small

boy

I

influenced and defined by the passions, conflicts and character of his family. The environment is not an external documentary, but one which is formed,

instant by instant, out of Arturo's

perceptions.

Thus Barea wields both factors, explain himself. consciousness

character and conditions, to

He seeks to penetrate to the roots of his

and

at

the

same

time

describe

the

social

conditions that formed himself and millions more.

HAPPINESS AND PICARESQUE.

"In Spain you can find the happiest children in Europe, even though they are often barefoot and in rags," wrote Henry Miller, a remark doubtless coloured by Miller's nostalgie de la

baue, for starving dirty children are not so often happy (27). But what was true was the rowdiness and zest of children in the Madrid of La forja. Barea has the gift of confronting the most crude

and

unpleasant

scenes

directly,

yet

combining

his

unflinching eye with humour and energy.

There is a cast of dozens in La forja whom Barea treats with affection and humour: the blind musicians in the Cafe espanol, 77

Angel the newspaper boy, Senora Francisca, the beggars at the theatre. And in every description there is the sound of children running and

shouting,

throwing stones

at

lamps

and mud at

washing, sprinting with papers from door to door, fishing balls out of the sewer or fighting with gangs from the neighbouring

barrio. Or else there is the opposite, complementary presence of a serious child watching quietly, in the Cafe, in the coach or on the street: "Salen los senores de frac y chistera ... y las mujeres can sus ... trajes de seda ... EI mendigo, con las barbas piojosas, les tiene la puerta abierta del coche con una mano y can la otra les hace la reverencia can un pingajo que es la gorra 0 la boina pringosa. Cuando se paran a hablar en la misma puerta del cache, el mendigo, con la cabeza al aire, sin gaban, se muere del frio y patalea con sus alpargatas las piedras de la acera." (28) You can picture the observant small boy keenly watching the social comedy. With passages like this, what

he

himself

more

than

once

Barea contributes to

highlighted

in

his

later

criticism: " ... the note of hunger ... in Spanish reali ty ... [and] in Spanish literature. It sounds, hardly softened by genteel manners, through the nineteenth-century novels of Benito Perez Gald6s; it speaks from the pages of the young Pia Baroja early in this century; it cries out from the novels of Ram6n J. Sender." (29) In La forja,

the portraits of the hungry are filled with the

affection and vitality of the young boy. Often the descriptions of people and situations spillover into the picaresque; that is,

a

sort

of

comlC,

ironic

commentary on appearance

and

reality, which is deeply rooted in Spanish life and literature. In La forja there are many examples,

like the extract above

about the beggars; or the story of the beggars buying meat they could not afford for themselves to try and save the life of Toby,

the dead Senora Segunda' s dog;

or the kindly Segunda

herself, living and dying in the cupboard beneath the stairs. 78

CHURCH.

When Barea takes up the narrative after the country chapters, the young Arturo has left his infancy and begins his boyhood in School

and

Church.

These

two

institutions

are

intimately

connected, as it is a Church School which he attends.

Before Barea deals head on with the religious question, he has made sure there are frequent references to the Church: as usual, he creates a context, lays trails, before tackling a question frontally. The question was introduced right at the start with the comments about the priests educating the Prince. Arturo's most direct religious influence is Baldomera, every afternoon to mass.

who takes him

This leads the boy to identify the

Church with being forced to come in from playing in the street: attendance at Church becomes identified with social rigidity.

The conventionally rebellious reaction of the young boy is first given depth by his forthright grandmother Ines, who tells Aunt Baldomera: "-- Con tanto cura y tanto rezo, le estais atontando." (30) Arturo is so torn by the ensuing argument that, when asked by Ines if he prefers play to prayer, he lies: "Para no disgustar mas a mi tia, le digo que me gusta mucho la iglesia." Ines shouts back at him: "--Tu, 10 que eres, es un marica." (31) This is the first of three references In forty pages where Arturo is taunted for being a mar~ca,

a term meaning 'sissy'

with an overtone of homosexual (32). The proselytising atheist Ines, mother of twenty-five children (so Barea tells us!), who,

79

as village gossip had it, wore out her dead husband, represents the opposi te pole, imagery,

not only religiously but also In sexual

to the timid hysterical Baldomera.

Thus the sexual

question lS linked to religion: and heterosexuality (fertility) and atheism are united in the figure of Ines.

Ines' views are not mindless. Astutely, she tells the child: "Cuando tu madre se qued6 viuda, 10 unico que Dios hizo por ella, fue dejarla en un hotel con dos duros en el bolsillo y tu padre fiarnbre en la cama." (33) Her arguments are the conventional ones that the world is harsh and cruel; and yet the priests get fat and rich. These are Vlews that Arturo will be

able

to

test

out

for himself when in

adolescence he begins to link the Church to a dominant role in a class-divided society. For the present his conflict remains unresolved: "Yo quiero creer en Dios y en la Virgen, pero las cosas que dice [Ines] son verdad." (34) Crucially, Ines does not stop him gOlng to Church. The ten yearold attends for two reasons: he feels it would be sinful not to go and he finds pleasure in going alone

(35). It is in such

passages that Barea demonstrates his depth in tackling these themes, going beyond black and white alternatives. He shows the child's religious fascination for things not understood; and then his clear-sightedness, which allows him to demystify what he does see. The child Arturo notices, for example, the higher class of skulls used in the richer funerals

(a macabre touch

typical of Barea). He observes the cleaning-woman spitting on her cloth to clean the Virgin's eyes ... 'igual que se les quita las legafias a los chicos'

(36).

Using such physical images,

Barea makes us feel the child's simultaneous attraction and rejection. 80

Chapter X, the last chapter of Part One of La forja is entitled

La iglesia. And Part Two opens with the death of Arturo's uncle and a momentous future,

clash between Baldomera and Ines

over his

when Ines intervenes against the wittily-named Padre

Morcilla (black pudding)

to prevent Arturo's being sent to a

Jesuit school (37).

Arturo's religious conflict is developed by these events into a clear-cut anti -religious posi tion. Barea's mature

Vlew

are

The several components of

well-summarised much

later

in the

opening of La llama, when Barea in a long conversation with Don Lucas, the parish priest of Naves, expresses his hostility to the Church: "' ... pues, bien, yo no vengo a la iglesia, porque en la iglesia estan Ustedes y somos incompatibles. A mi me ensenaron una religion que, en doctrina, era todo amor, perdon y caridad. Francamente, salvo muy contadas excepciones, me he encontrado siempre con que los ministros de esta religion poseen todas las cualidades humanas imaginables, menos precisamente estas tres cualidades divinas. '" (38) After explaining this personal reason, Barea goes on to tell Don Lucas: " ... [Vd deberia] utilizar[ia] el pulpito para ensenar la palabra de Cristo y no para propaganda politica." (39) This

emphasis

experiences

relates

directly

recounted

In

La

back

forja,

to

the

where

church-school

Arturo

came

to

understand the social role of the Church and confirm for himself Ines'

opinions.

John

Devlin

suggests

that

beneath Barea's

hostility to the Church lies an approach which is not in itself anti -religious

(40). Passages such as the above are ci ted by

Devlin to show how Barea counterposes an ideal Christianity to the

rotten

reaction

of

the

Church

argument is reduced to this assertion: 81

hierarchy.

But

Devlin's

"There is a warmth and a value structure that is bedrock in the ideology of Catholicism or any Western religion, for that matter ... [Arturo Barea is one of many] ... embi ttered lapsed catholics." (41) These views, shared by other Catholic critics, are inappropriate on two counts. There is very little bitterness in any of Barea's writing before his last novel, La raiz rota. And secondly, it is tautological

to

suggest

Barea

had

a

religious

sensibility

despite his well-argued hostility, based on his own experience, to the Church. An atheist is an atheist. Barea's charitable and pacifist feelings are derived not from Christianity, but from various figures in his childhood such as his mother and uncles as well as from the Socialist tradition with which he came into contact in his teens.

PRIESTS.

Barea's

Vlews

and

feelings

were

part

of

a

long

popular

anticlerical tradition in Spain. Arturo's anticlericalism was a key aspect of what made him a rebel against the established powers, a principal pillar of which was the Church.

It is at Arturo's school that he first links social hierarchy and religion. When he steps up from the school's bottom rung through ability, he finds that those who are there through birth look down on him. The teachers in this school are that varied collection of priests he mentioned later to Don Lucas: the vain Padre Fidel, the sadistic Vesga (42), the unworldly Prefecto and Arturo's protector, the kindly Padre Joaquin, who explains:

82

" 'TV. no sabes por que soy cura. Los padres ... eran pobres. ' " ( 43)

There are two other gentle,

strong priests like Joaquin In

Barea's writing. The anti-fascist priest in the sketch Refugio (See Chapter 2) explained: " 'A un lado habia ricos acompafiados por sacerdotes; al otro

lado pobres abandonados por sacerdotes. '"

(44)

Barea is talking about the Civil War. But his words are equally applicable

to Baldomera' s

confessor,

Morcilla,

thirty years

before; or right back to the trilogy's second page, where the priest is

teaching the dumb prince.

For priests of peasant

origin like Joaquin, such comfortable jobs were not open.

The other 'good father' is Leocadio Lobo, who counsels Ilsa and Arturo at the time of their sacking from the press censorship in 1937, and whom even the anarchist execution squads respect (45). What the priest of Refugio says, serves for himself, Lobo and Joaquin: "Soy hijo de unos labradores de Castilla. Estaba destinado de labrar la tierra ... Pero, sali un chico listo. El cura de mi pueblo se fij6 en mi. Me tom6 interes ... y a los once afios me mandaron al seminario." (46) Barea saw in them his own possible fate, only averted by Ines' clear-headedness and strong will Jesuits'

clutches.

Barea

never

in keeping him out of the confuses

the

oppressive

institution of the Church with the individuals within it, many of whom are the Church's victims as well as its servants.

Barea is careful,

therefore,

to explain how the peasant or

working-class priests at the bottom of the heap came to be priests through social necessi ty.

83

He shows us how many were

twisted by the experience,

like Padre Vesga; or crushed like

Padre Fidel. Others came through the experience with the dignity and kindness of Lobo or Joaquin.

WORK.

The other focus of the second part of La forja is the world of Work. His uncle's untimely death pitches the young Arturo still 'semi-hombre, semi-nino'

(47) -- out of his engineering

studies into a world he hadn't expected to enter.

In school he had learnt the hard way how he and the other two scholarship boys are separate both from the poor whence they have corne and from the rich, who despise them. Arturo learns the need for basic solidarity in order to defend himself. These school experiences both extend into a wider social setting his family's taunts of senorita; and show how his class background excludes him from really being a senorita.

He learnt too another important lesson in behaviour. He found that at school he could gain a certain protection by offering the services of his intelligence to the rich, the real senoritas (48). It is the first instance of a pattern that will profoundly

shape his life, until the pattern is forcibly broken by exile. He can sell his labour power at a high price, enabling him to be well-paid and enjoy privileged positions. But this of course weighs against solidarity with the poor -- whether the other two scholarship boys or later the UGT. 84

Accompanied by these contradictory lessons of solidarity and selling his services, the 13-year old Arturo

lS

thrown into the

world of work as a chupatintas, a pen-pusher. In the bank he meets the half-blind family man, Luis PIa, a courageous clerk loved and respected by Barea

In all

three volumes

of

the

trilogy. PIa sets out to educate the adolescent boy: "Aqui tienes tu porvenir. Fijate: un ano sin sueldo, sesenta chicos como tu, tres plazas al ano y a los doce de estar en la casa, 90 pesetas al m~s como gano yo." (49) This extract comes from the chapter enti tIed Trabaj 0, Barea explains the work condi tions

In the bank.

where

Subsequent

chapters also have representative rather than concrete titles: Capitalista, where Arturo yearns for individual wealth to change

his and his family's life; and Proletario, where he perceives his true condition and joins the UGT.

The first thing Arturo encounters In the bank are the cruel practical jokes of initiation into the worlds of men and work. He defends himself, both verbally and in practice, and rapidly becomes tel corredor mas agil del Banco' (50). The young Arturo wants to rise in the great bank. He dreams of being a permanent employee, supporting his family, becoming a gentleman. But his mentor PIa seeks to disabuse him of false hope: "Es la explotaci6n sistematica del chico. Esta muy bien estudiada." (51) A number

of

incidents,

Occurrence and telling,

many

of

them

picaresque

In

their

confirm PIa's view. Medina is denied

promotion in the cruellest of ways: when he had been led to believe he would be promoted because of his knowledge of English (52). Another employee Recalde ... 'se ha puesto a dar punetazos en la mesa y a decir barbaridades, , 85

in fury at the miserly

Christmas bonus (53). These incidents teach Arturo an important lesson: that anyone can be dismissed at the drop of a hat and that individual rebellion leads nowhere.

The clerks often work twelve hours a day, watched and controlled by their bosses: "Cuando nos vamos a casa, tenemos los dedos pelados del polvillo del papel, estriados de tinta seca en granos microscopicos." (54) However, not all is woe: other incidents show employees' cunning in fighting back against such treatment. On one occasion the watchman pretends not to recognise a boss and detains him at gun-point for suspicious behaviour: the boss had been tip-toeing secreti vely in order to spy on employees

(55). And Pla faces

down the boss when he is accused of going to bars, by drawing attention to the boss's own drinking habits.

In the Capitalista chapter, an interlude in the description of work at the bank, Arturo inherits 30,000 pesetas. Now he dreams of moving from the slum attic, of going up in the world. But his mother is staying put. And significantly the one article of real value which Arturo gains from his inheritance is the electric light, by which he can read.

In Proletario, back at the bank, he has to abandon fairy-tale resolutions to his problems and confront the realities of his job. He has already seen how the bank saps everyone's courage: "Aquel miedo de meri torio de que Ie echaran a uno a la calle antes de terminar el ano de trabajo gratis, se aumenta entre los hombres, ya empleados hechos y derechos. Los hacen cobardes." (56)

86

Courage 1S not only needed in the war-context, which Barea had described in Valor y miedo. Pla helps the young Arturo draw together the threads of his dashed hopes, desires for betterment and outrage at injustice. Barea tells us: "Durante dias he pensado sobre estas cosas. Claro que s~ 10 que son los socialistas. Pero todo esto son cuestiones de politica que no me interesan." (57) But he decides Pla is right and he must join a union. Pla takes him to the Casa del Pueblo, where 25 years later Barea would train clerks to bear arms. There Barea joins the UGT: but not before, prickly and argumentative as always, he has entered into a tremendous row with a worker who had commented on his clerk's suit: 'Aqui no suelen venir senoritos.'

(58)

RANCOUR?

The word Barea himself uses to describe his fiery reaction 1n the Casa del Pueblo is 'rancour': " ... me dej 0 llevar de un impulso violento ... Suel to discurso lleno de todos los rencores." (59)

un

A more secure person, someone not torn by internal conflict as to whether he was a worker or a gentleman, would have responded with a calmer explanation. And a less spirited person would have kept his mouth shut.

As has been mentioned earlier in this chapter, Alborg, writing ln 1962, argued: "[Barea demuestra] ... rencor y falta de generosidad temperamentales ... intolerancia antipatica ... soberbia altanera, proyectada sobre sus propios familiares." (60) Alborg echoes Yndurain and Aranguren's comments that Barea was a resentido, and suggests that life was not so hard on Barea as 87

he pretends: " [Barea no era capaz de] ... aceptar con ... ironia la caravana inevitable de las humanas estupideces." (61)

There is a central problem to this sort of criticism: it is very much ad hominem, fatally mixing the author's (Barea's) own life and views with his literary production. This is inevitable to some degree, given the kind of book that the trilogy is. It is also easy to drift into the opposi te danger of arguing pro hominem out of sympathy with the author's personality.

However,

within

Alborg's

comments

lS

a

potentially

valid

literary criticism: that the 'rencores' and 'soberbia altanera' have nothing to do with and are not explained by 'su posterior rebeli6n social' (62). Alborg suggests that the self-proclaimed alm of the book, l.e. to explain the forging of a rebel, does not work; that the narrator's social rebellion is not justified by the circumstances of his childhood, but is due to character flaws; and therefore (Alborg does not state this explicitly, but it can be

justly inferred from his

comments)

Barea cannot

properly hold himself up as a typical member of his generation.

It is certainly true that Barea shows us an often prickly child and adolescent in La forja. The hero takes nothing lying down. But

this

lS

entirely

characteristic

of

any

rebel

and

individualist. Barea does not pretend to be a typical person. By defini tion, typical,

no wri ter,

no union activist,

nor any rebel lS

for such people are tiny minorities in society. But

what Barea does argue is that the conditions which produced him were typical. He states this distinction very clearly in the 88

1943 foreword to the second volume: "I wanted to describe the shocks which had scarred my mind because I am convinced that these shocks, in different individual forms but from the same collective causes scarred and shaped the minds of other Spaniards too. I wanted to expose my own reactions, because I believed that the others' reactions were determined by kindred forces, and that the world they saw was the same as mine, even though seen through different lenses." (63) Here Barea did not claim that his own reactions, as set out in

La forja, justified his rebellion, nor that he shared the same experiences as his contemporaries. However he did argue that his own and his generation's reactions were 'determined by kindred forces,'

despite their worlds being

'seen through different

lenses. '

Arturo Barea described an unusual child, in an unusual social situation, which gave him that 'double vision' to see inside and outside his

experience;

a

character wi th certain innate or

circumstantial qualities of 'doble insumisi6n, ' storming against all sides. He wanted to believe in God and hated the Church. He wanted to be rich and hated being a senorito. He wanted to be a unionist and bristled at how the unionists treated him.

Barea selected his material carefully to develop these themes. But he did not manipulate his own character in order to justify with

hindsight

his

rebellion.

Rather,

his

character

and

circumstances allowed him certain insights, which led him to perceive and

record

some of the

generation and class.

89

experiences

common to

his

But dissection of the volume should not lead to its quality and uni ty being

forgotten.

La

forja

lS

Barea' s

best book.

The

historian Hugh Thomas caught its overall impact: "In [The Forge] there are brilliant, self-confident pictures of Barea's family, all, as it were, peering over the edge of the giant cauldron of Spanish working-class feelings to see what sort of mixture will result. Don Luis, the blacksmith of Brunete, with his breakfasts of rabbit and brandy, is a particularly compelling figure. These 200 or so pages seem to me to be among the two or three best pieces of writing ever done which are inspired by working-class life. Or can one call that world of craftsmen about to sink, or about to rise, as fate determines, really 'working-class'? I think not: indeed, the whole sweep of this section of Barea's work reminds one of the diversity of the class ... Priests and engine drivers, lion tamers and cashiers, matadors and beggars -- all live forever caught by one short sentence or anecdote, thanks to Barea' s acute and selective memory." (64) ************************

90

NOTES. 1. Sanz Villanueva, Santos, Historia de espanola, (Madrid 1980), Vol. II, p.153.

la

novela

social

2. FR, p.9 3. The strength and skill of the child's-eye view is demonstrated negatively by the rare occasions when Barea departs from it, for example: "Madrid viejo, mi Madrid de nino, es una oleada de nubes y de ondas." (FR, p. 88) This sentence is part of a long intrusion in the author's own voice, where he attempts to evoke his lost youth in a pseudopoetic style, which completely breaks the flow of the child's eye and voice. 4. FR, p.10 5. FG & HR, p.108 6. Mario Camus'

film of La forja de espanola, 1990) falls to some degree sentimental view of life in the slums. reality of urban poverty in a city where

(Televisi6n into a nostalgic and It fails to evoke the hunger was omnipresent.

un

rebelde

7 . FR, P .10

8 . Ibid. P .10

9. Ibid. P .10

10. Ibid. P .10 11. Ibid. P .14 12. Ibid. p.25 13. Benedetti, Mario, art. ci t. , p.375. 14. Ibid. p.375 15. Ibid. p.376

16. FR, p.55 17. Ibid. p.728

18. FG Y HR, p.103.

19. Barea, Arturo, in Cela, Camilo Jose, The Hive (London 1953), introduction, pp.14-15. 20. Ibid. p.15

91

21. FR, p.30. In some of La forja, including this chapter on the trip from Madrid to the country, Barea added bits in the second English edit,io? of 1946 an~ ~lso in the 1951 first Spanishlanguage edltlon. The addltlons tended to be descriptive costumbrista passages. It appears that, as he grew older Barea became more nostalgic and felt it more important to reco~d this lost Madrid of his childhood. In this period he also wrote the nostalgic and costumbrista stories Fisica aplicada and Madrid entre ayer y hoy (both 1948), published in El centro de la pista. 22. Ibid. p.31 23. Alborg, Juan Luis, op.cit., p.230. 24. FR, p. 41 25. Ibid. p.49 26. Ibid. pp.54-5 27. Miller, Henry, Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, (New York 1957), p.101. 28. FR, p.109 29. Barea in: Cela, op.cit., p.13 (see Note 19). 30. FR, p. 37 31. Ibid. p.38 32. These three references occur on pages 38, 55-56 and 76 of FR. Chapters One and Six discuss in detail Barea' s atti tudes to women and sex, formed by these experiences and reactions. But for this chapter's purpose, it suffices to note how his rage at taunts of marica is closely linked to his sensi ti vi ty about being a senorito who hides in his aunt's skirts. 33. FR, p.70 34. Ibid. p.70 35. Ibid. p.67 ff. 36. Ibid. p.68 37. Ibid. p.136 38. Ibid. p.513 39. Ibid. p.514 40. Devlin, John, op. ci t. , pp. 161-168 41. Ibid. P .168 92

42. In 'Spain before the Falange,' The Nation, May 3, 1975, Hugh Thomas comments that he had found Vesga's name among a list of priests killed in 1936. 43. FR, p.194 44. Barea, Arturo, Valor y miedo, p.97 45. FR, p.754 46. VM, p.97 47. FR, p.193 48. Ibid. p.92 ff. 49. Ibid. p.168 50. Ibid. p.165 51. Ibid. p.167 52. Ibid. p.171 53. Ibid. p.171 54. Ibid. p.172 55. Ibid. p.170 56. Ibid. p.199 57. Ibid. p.220 58. Ibid. p.222 59. Ibid. p.222 60. Alborg, Ope cit., p.238. 61. Ibid. p.230 62. Ibid. p.229 63. Barea, Arturo, The Track, op.cit., p.8. 64. Thomas, Hugh, art. cit. in Note 42. ----------------

93

CHAPTER FIVE.

MOROCCO: LA RUTA.

THE FIG-TREE AND THE TRACK. La ruta, the second volume of the trilogy, recounts the decisive

experiences

which

lead

Barea

from

the

uncertainties

and

contradictions of his childhood, described in La forja, towards the Civil

War.

purposes were

And in mind

always

his

twin private

it portrays

the

and public

impact

that

the

Moroccan colonial war had on his generation and Spanish society.

Helen Grant considered La ruta 'the most powerful and original' volume of the trilogy (1). It is not a common view: most critics prefer La forja and most non-Spanish readers find La llama more gripping, because of its focus on the Civil War.

But Grant is surely right when she states the following about La ruta:

"It is the most economical and best constructed of the novels, beginning and ending with the track of a road he [Barea] helped to build across the desert, a track soon soaked wi th blood and which ultimately led back to other roads soaked with blood, the blood of the Civil War. (2) II

La ruta was easier to structure than the other two volumes of

the trilogy, as Barea's arrival in Morocco and return to Madrid provide a natural beginning and end.

However the volume is

structured not only chronologically,

but by the use of two

recurrent images, used by Barea to highlight his themes. 94

The title itself, as Grant suggests, echoes with meanings. The blood-stained ruta (or track), which Barea helps to build, heads nowhere, just like Spain's occupation of Morocco. Additionally, the 'track' is the historical path which runs from Morocco to the Civil War, most clearly personified in the figures of the generals Millan and Franco; and also the compressed path of Spanish history,

where forms of feudal ownership and modern

factory organisation co-exist, where Franco and the anarchists developed side by side.

La ruta is also the track of tarmac which is poured over the

aspirations of the Moroccans to freedom.

With direct sarcasm

(delicate irony was never his forte) Barea explains: "La kabila ya no existe y s610 hay unos manchones negros por el humo ... Cientos de hombres cavan la tierra y allanan un camino ancho que pasara al pie de la kabila y la kabila se beneficiara del camino. jAh! No. No podra beneficiarse, porque ya no existe." (3)

In addition to the track, Barea uses another repeated image: the fig-tree, which the soldiers have to remove in order to create the road. He describes this tree as follows: " ... con sus raices retorcidas como venas de abuelo robusto, can sus ramas contorsionadas, repletas de hojas carnosas, treboles carcomidos." (4) Roots and trees recur In Barea' s work:

in La raiz rota he

exhausts almost every variation on the image of roots

(see

Chapter 9). In La ruta, the fig-tree is the only living thing remaining after the destruction of the kabila (village). But it obstructs the new road and will itself have to go. Its root, however,

is stubbornly resistant to pick and steel. Barea is

struck by

the

idea

that

the

95

tree's

fertile

splendour

and

strength indicate water in the barren land. After persuading his superiors to save the tree by building the road round it, he then creates a shaded drinking-fountain at its side.

For Barea, the tree represents a positive good, In contrast to the track. In the opening chapter, he interleaves its story with the meticulous detailing of mili tary corruption.

Later,

the

narrator comforts his mother, who is terrified by fantasies of the horrors of life in Morocco

(the reality is,

ironically,

worse than her historical fancies of Berber slaving pirates!), with embellished tales of the beautiful tree and water, which provide refreshment for Moroccans and Spaniards alike (5).

In the shade of this tree, Barea discusses the Spanish Empire with a Moroccan village chief, a conversation echoed at the end of the volume, when Barea, lying under other trees, in the EI Pardo woods near Madrid, remembers an old blind Moroccan who had come down the path by the

fig-tree,

then lost his way.

To

8area's explanation that the landscape had changed because they were building a new road, the blind man laughed theatrically and said: " Yo siempre he caminado por la vereda. jSiempre, siempre! No quiero que mis babuchas se escurran en sangre yeste camino esta lleno de sangre todo el. Lo veo. Y se volvera de llenar de sangre, jotra vez y cien veces mas!" (6) This incident is told on the last page of La ruta. Abstracted from the volume's vivid concrete descriptions, the symbolism of the fig-tree

and the

road would be too simplistic:

and in

itself, the device of a blind man fortuitously dropping by to deliver the author's message is crude.

96

In the context of the volume, however, the symbols -- or images come to

life and work.

The

fig-tree

represents Barea' s

yearning for peaceful co-existence between Arab and Spaniard (7); and the bload-soaked track leading nowhere recalls the cruel reality of corruption and death. As Barea asserts: "Durante los primeros veinticinco afios de este siglo Marruecos no fue mas que un campo de batalla, un burdel y una taberna inmensos." (8)

EXPLICIT POLITICAL COMMENT.

The tone of La ruta lS different from that of La forja. Most obviously La ruta is told in the past, not the present, tense. Another major difference is the increase in direct political comment. Barea's understanding at the time of writing (1940-42) of the

direction

of

events,

l. e.

hindsight,

lS

no

longer

suppressed, as it almost always was In La forja. No longer is the author observing his past through a child's eyes.

Despi te

this

increased poli tical

discourse,

Barea lS

still

careful not to diverge into abstract commentary. He consistently presents political and historical events through their impact on the daily life of himself and other soldiers, as if major events were stones thrown into a stream whose impact is only felt as they sink slowly into the current of daily life.

One clear

example is the arrival of a new High Command. The effect of this political change, which will overturn the soldiers' routine, is shown through a terrible parade in the heat: "Tuvimos dos casos de insolaci6n y cinco de desmayo. Lo mismo ocurrlO con los demas regimientos. El nuevo alto comisario habia emprendido bien su carrera." (9) 97

Nearly all the major political developments of the war are likewise first introduced through a description of their impact on the soldiers. Barea rarely explains an event's significance until he has already presented an illustrative description or anecdote. And sometimes, as in the case of Millan Astray, the reader is left to draw his/her own conclusions, wi thout any authorial comment at all.

General Millan is introduced when the narrator attends a prebattle parade (10). The fascist ideology, the brutality of the leader and brutishness of the men are seen and felt. The reader is

led

to

feel

the

power

of

reactionary

fanaticism

In

a

genuinely shocking moment, when the narrator is moved to shout along with the aroused legionaries: IfCuando la Bandera grito con entusiasmo salvaje, yo grite como ellos. (11) 1f

The socialist, rationalist author was aroused emotionally by the demagogic Millan. The author's technique of describing the scene from the participant's point of view makes it harder for the reader to stand aside, draws him/her too into the scene.

Despite,

therefore,

much more political comment than In

La

forja, Barea retains vividness, pace and characterisation both

by use of the key images

(the track and the fig tree) and by

telling public events through the eyes of the soldiers directly affected. These are methods of fiction, autobiography.

And

Barea

thus

rather than essay or

maintains,

in

spi te

of

differences, a unity of method with the first volume: he does not propagandise directly.

98

HINDSIGHT AND FORESIGHT.

As befits the middle volume of a trilogy, Barea moves forward and

backward

in

time

with

his

political

comment.

He

1S

interested in clarifying the roots of the Civil War in Morocco and in explaining the causes of the Moroccan War. The following analysis of three pages in the middle of the volume illustrates this method.

During his convalescence after typhus, Barea returns to Madrid and there visits his brother's boss, owner of a bakery. This small capitalist explains how he has been ruined by the superior economic power of Count Romanones. Barea makes the point that the old entrenched ruling-class not only uses its power and ruthlessness against the workers, but also against modernising progressive capitalists such as his brother's boss.

This boss asks him in turn about Morocco. Barea replies: " ... Le dije que yo no sabia nada de Marruecos y que s610 podia contarle 10 que habia visto yo mismo." (12) The boss then starts to express his own liberal views about Morocco. But Barea is not listening. The name of Romanones has set him off on a reminiscence of his time working in Guadalajara (13). He explains how Motores Espana was set up:

this firm

enjoyed a monopoly of supplies to the Army and 'free' shares were issued to Romanones and the King. These marginalised the inventor La Cierva, enabling Motores Espana to bleed the State dry, whilst producing defective goods for the Moroccan War.

99

Barea recalls too the people of Guadalajara: "Su vida se habia cambiado. Todo aquello fue para mi una alegre diversi6n. Pero ahora, cuatro anos mas tarde, veia el otro lado de la historia ... Veia con toda claridad la ruta que llevaba desde Guadalajara a Marruecos." (14) Barea

demonstrates

accomplished

skills

of

narration

and

compression of material without loss of subtlety in these three pages. He interweaves his own youthful exci tement alegre

di versi6n' )

on

starting

his

(' fue una

prestigious

job

at

Guadalajara, with the factory's mixed effect on the people of the

town;

and

suggests

the

links

between

the

old

landed

aristocracy, the Monarchy, Capital and the war in Morocco. All started from the image of the frustrated modernising baker: a new Spain struggling to throw off the straitjackets of the old.

Barea also looks forward on several occasions In La ruta. Here, in contrast to La forja,

Barea does exploit the benefit of

hindsight, and most interestingly in the portrayal of Franco. The theme is announced directly in the chapter called E1 embri6n de dictador. But first, Barea interests us in the story of the

unhappy Sanchiz, who had joined the Legion 'para que le mataran' (15). Franco is introduced through Sanchiz' account: "' . .. el Tercio es algo asi como estar en un presidio. Los mas chulos son los amos de la carcel. Y algo de esto ha pasado a este hombre [Franco]. Todo el mundo le odia, igual que todos los penados odian al jaque mas criminal del presidio, y todos le obedecen y le respetan, porque se impone a todos los demas, exactamente como el mat6n de presidio se impone al presidio entero. Yo se cuantos oficiales del Tercio se han ganado un tiro en la nuca en un ataque. Hay muchos que quisieran pegarle un tiro por la espalda a Franco, pero ninguno de ellos tiene el coraje de hacerlo. Les da miedo de que pueda volver la cabeza, precisamente cuando estan tomandole punteria. (16) 'II

It is only after this chilling anecdote has

introduced the

figure of Franco that Barea draws his more general political 100

conclusions. He discusses the problems within the Army and ends the chapter with the explicit statement: "Entre los 'her6icos' estaba el nuevo j efe [Franco] del Tercio. Y el Tercio crecia rapidamente como un Estado dentro del Estado, como un cancer dentro del ej erci to ... Pero de ser un heroe de esta clase a ser un rebelde -- y un fascista --, no hay rna s qu e un pas 0 ." ( 1 7 ) Barea's particular type of book, half-way between autobiography and fiction, allows him to pick the best of both genres for his purposes.

Techniques

of

fiction

are used to bring to

life

characters such as Sanchiz; and then history and biography draw out explicit conclusions. But Barea's approach remains what he taught himself when he started to re-write La forja: that the sights,

sounds

and

smells

are

more

effective

than

direct

propaganda.

INTELLECTUALS.

In Morocco

these

sights,

sounds

and

smells

are

especially

brutal. The whole volume is an analysis of an army in a cruel war, the last major colonial war the Spanish Army fought, one in which generals and common soldiers alike are shown as corrupted, maddened and brutalised.

There was nothing In itself exceptional about Barea's picture of 'la realidad

en

crudo'

and denunciation

of

the

war

(IS).

Marra-L6pez described the background atmosphere: "Reciente todavia el desastre del 9S ... la generaci6n que arranca bajo esa comun etiqueta adopta una po~tura critfca y revisionista de la sociedad espanola, con Slncero afan de presentar la realidad tal como es y, al mismo tiempo -- a pesar de la carga Ii teraria que acarreaban -- llegar a la entrana intima de ser espanol." (19) 101

Barea's aims fit precisely within this framework. His work In particular stands alongside two other fictional accounts of Morocco, Diaz Fernandez's El blocao (1928)

and Sender's Iman

(1930), which both appeared much earlier than Barea's (1943). Barea took

advantage

of

wri ting many years

later both

to

assimilate these two works (and others he might have read) and reflect on the Moroccan War in the light of the Civil War that followed. Those reflections help give La ruta greater political depth than Iman or El Blocao (20).

But in order only to repudiate the Moroccan War, there was no need of hindsight. The war polarised Spanish society at the time and

constructed

dictatorship,

a

firm

maj ori ty

against

with which Alfonso XIII

had so

the

mili tary

ill-advisedly

thrown in his lot.

Spain's most prestigious intellectuals joined forces with the working-class

in

their

hatred

of

this

war

(21).

Unamuno

inveighed against the war and the dictatorship from his exile in Saint Jean and became, in Barea's later words: n ... simbolo de la lucha espiritual por la libertad entre los intelectuales del mundo enteron (22).

A

distinction needs to be made. Few of these intellectuals were

anti-imperialist on the basis of principle. That is to say, they were less interested in the war's effect on the Moroccan people and Spanish working-class and peasantry, than in the question of the destiny of Spain as a nation. As Jose Marra-Lopez so vividly describes:

102

"Si es cierto, que cuando el desastre del 98 Espana estaba sin pulso ... Y esta sociedad de estructuras petrificadas y vigas carcomidas, puras apariencias de fachada, se hallaba cansada a~ot~d~, arruina?a, fisic~ ~ espiritualmente, econ6mica ~ blolog1camente, vleJa y esceptlca, a pesar del maravilloso fondo de reserva que siempre ha sacado nuestro pueblo en los momentos mas insospechados ... No es de extranar el ansia de verdad y realismo, de renovaci6n y critica implacable que llev6 a los intelectuales espanoles a adoptar posturas antibelicas y contrarias a nuevas aventuras colonizadoras." (23) Barea was always keen to place himself among this pueblo. In him a proud sense of belonging to the people combined with a streak of crude anti-intellectualism -- his gut reason for placing in the middle of La ruta an account of the rebuffs from literary intellectuals that he had suffered ten years earlier. The other reason for the insertion of this passage (which can appositely be discussed as a tangent at this point) had more to do with the volume's structure and style: he wished to show the contrast between the brutish anti-literate atmosphere of the army and the rarefied alr of literary circles in the capital -- to both of which he was equally hostile. It is a further example of his 'doble insumisi6n', that is to say, rejection of both options

open to him, reminiscent of his attitudes as a child (24).

Barea recalled in this chapter, entitled Frente al mar, how he and his

friend

Cabanillas

(who was

to become a

successful

journalist) had embarked on literary careers in 1913 by sending contributions

to

the

press

introductions

to

'los

grandes

espanola'

The

(25) •

maestros

two de

then la

sought

literatura

(26).

The descriptions of the two young aspirants' encounters with these maestros

are

among

the

best

of

passages. He first meets a hack writer: 103

Barea' s

costumbrista

"Llevaba ... el apodo que el mismo se habia dado, de el 'Ultimo Bohemio' ... fumando incesante una pipa que, a veces, rellenaba con colillas" (27). This cynical character advises Barea to write pornography or plays. Barea then investigates the Ateneo. Here he found: " ... senores graves ... en interminables discusiones sobre la Republica de Plat6n, 0 la significaci6n esoterica de Don Quijote. [Yo] Carecia de interes y de conocimientos suficientes." (28) Barea then starts to explore the tertulias of literary figures. The descriptions of these are perhaps where Barea did earn the epithet of those 1950s critics who cried 'resentido' (29). His resentment

and

anger

at

lack

of

opportuni ty

emerged In

a

malicious sketch of Benavente, who reclines on a sofa in the Cafe de Castilla while his talentless acolytes talk endlessly about the 'obra superlativa de Benavente' (30).

Valle-Inclan was monarch of another cafe: "Don Ram6n estaba inclinado sobre la mesa, su barba flameando como un banderin, sus gafas de concha saltando incesantes de una cara a la otra, para ver Sl alguno se atrevia a contradecirle." (31) The young Barea tells us (of course!) that he rose to challenge Don Ram6n. The accounts of these encounters acquire allegorical proportions:

the

'last

bohemian'

represents

writing

sold

cynically as a commodity; in the Ateneo, we see the dead tones of abstract discourse for discourse's sake; in Benavente, smug triumph; and in Valle-Inclan, a rage against mediocrity. From Valle-Inclan, Barea received the classic advice of a maestro to young writers: "-- Si 10 que usted quiere es aprender a escribir, quedese en casa y estudie ... no venga a estas tertulias ... De aqui no va usted a sacar mas provecho que, si acaso, un puesto de chupatintas en un peri6dico y la costumbre de tragarse todos los insul tos." (32) 104

At the end of his account of thwarted literary ambitions, Barea tells us sparely: "Renuncie a escribir." (33)

But in 1921 in Morocco, after his typhus and the confrontation with the violent death of others, Barea wanted to write again. It would not be until after another war crisis sixteen years later that he finally succeeded in starting to write seriously (see Chapter 2). He first had to follow his own sinuous path, through the practical exigencies of earning a living and the struggle to find where he belonged.

PACIFISM OR ANTI-IMPERIALISM

?

The opinions of Spanish intellectuals had Ii ttle impact on Barea, therefore, either in his youth or at the time of writing the trilogy. A greater discernible influence on him were the anti-war novels,

fashionable

in Europe

in the wake of the

1914-1918 slaughter. The most famous now is Remarque's All quiet on the Western Front. Barbusse and Rolland were equally popular names at the time:

they were translated into cheap Spanish

editions in the '20s and '30s, for a new, avid reading public (34). It

lS

very likely that Barea would have read many of these

books. He tells us for sure that in Morocco he read Berta von Suttner's pacifist Abajo las armas (an incendiary title for a serving soldier to carry!),

for

it is this book that Major

Tabasco found him reading and advised him to burn.

105

" ... En el momento que estos libros caen en las manos de estos pobres diablos que apenas si saben leer 0 escribir es 10 mismo que si les pusiera dinamita en las manos." (35) , But

La

ruta

more

1S

than

a

pacifist

novel:

Barea

goes

politically beyond the specific rejection of the Moroccan war, common to the intellectuals of the time, and further too than the pacifist rej ection of war in general.

"Barea was a very

humane man who hated violence and cruelty," Gerald Brenan wrote (36). Certainly,

rej ection of war and bloodshed infuses all

Barea's work. He tells us in La llama how he suffered ln his childhood a nervous attack at the sight of a man killed ln the street. In Morocco, he witnessed the aftermath of the massacre of Anual, and later suffered shell-shock and nervous disorders in the Civil War, Paris in 1938 and England during the Second World War

(37).

His

body and being rej ected bloodshed and

killing. In that sense, he was pacifist.

But La ruta is not only pacifist and anti-militarist, from the point of view of the deleterious effects on Spanish society of the war. Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset polemicised against the Moroccan War because of their desire to renew Spain. Barea shows us in La ruta the rights and humanity of the Moroccans. This is evident not so much in explicit statements but in some of the people he meets, such as the chieftain Sidi Yusef and the old blind man at the end; and most of all, in the imagery of the fig-tree. In this, Barea's political reach is longer than that of these intellectuals, and longer too than Sender's in Iman.

However

Barea was

not,

then

or

later,

a

full-blown

anti-

imperialist. His retreat to national patriotic arguments in his

106

acti vi ties

and wri tings during the Civil War

(discussed In

Chapter 2) shows his lack of political consistency. But the view we have described exists

in La ruta and adds an important

dimension to the book.

BRUTALITY.

We should turn now to look at some of the imagery Barea employs in this polemical onslaught against

the Moroccan War.

John

Devlin's reaction is typical of that of most readers: "[La Ruta es] ... de una brutalidad desnuda y muchas veces cruda, nacida de su tiempo, un producto de la violencia de la epoca." ( 3 8 ) Crudeness and brutality was indeed born of the 'midnight of the century' through which Barea lived. But that is not to say many writers

could

express

it.

Barea

contemporaries for this crudeness, Barea's

eye

is

unflinching:

he

is

exceptional

among

his

directness and brutali ty.

sees what

is

there without

closing his eyes in horror. His is the look of someone,

we

should remind ourselves, who needed to see clearly both in order to understand and to overcome his own fear and encroaching madness.

Putting on paper,

Importantly

however terrible,

was a therapy.

(and this connects wi th his previously-discussed

rejection of intellectuals) his eye, and therefore his tone, is not ironic, not distancing in the way that many intellectuals learn to view the, world. It is as close to the fact as word on paper can be.

•

107

Barea saw a scene as a participant, but at the same time could describe it calmly, as a witness, without partisan passion. In this he differs from the Sender of Iman.

Sender's blood

lS

usually hot and he is always seeking to describe the effect of what he sees on his protagonist. For example, in Iman, we read: "Huele a estiercol fermentado. Hayen esta rampa una subi ta cortadura, y abajo, a dos metros, varios cadaveres, que dos viejas desnudan con presurosa habilidad, mientras un moro, ya entrado en afios, fuma su pequefia pipa de kif." (39) It is a very similar passage to the following by Barea: "En el cuarto de atras habia cinco hombres muertos. Estaban empapados en su propia sangre, la cara, las manos, los uniformes, el cabello, las botas. La sangre habia hecho charcos en el suelo, manchurrones en las paredes, goterones en el techo, plastrones en cada rincon." (40)

From two passages alone, one cannot extrapolate two methods. But the brief extracts are illustrative: Barea's phrases tend to be brusquer,

accumulating detail and straining for the li teral

reality of the scene. Sender also writes scenes of great power: but

the

extract

suggests

his

leaning towards more

rolling

sentences and the unusual image.

Throughout his descriptions of battlefield carnage in Iman, Sender interweaves Viance's feelings and thoughts. Later in the same scene as the one above, Sender tells us: " ... la voz de Rivero se vuelve a oir y Viance se detiene, regresa a su lado, atraido por algo indefinible y molesto." (41) Barea too

is of course

interested in the reactions of his

protagonist -- himself -- but his narrative voice is not so intrusive. Sender is drawing a psychological portrait of his fictional

hero,

Viance;

whereas

Barea's

focus,

while

not

excluding his own reactions, is more on the society around him.

108 . :

,. .' ~

In La ruta, the narrator was allocated to the task of burying the mutilated, rotting bodies. The passage above is part of that description, the reality denying the dream of harmony between Spaniard

and

Moroccan,

which

Barea

expresses

through

the

fig-tree and the spring. After being immersed in the stench and horror of those days, he collapsed with typhus. In a passage of

La llama, while talking of later horrors during the Civil War, Barea reviewed what he had seen in Morocco: "Cuando tenia veinticuatro afios y vi aquel cuarto en el cuartel de la guardia civil de Melilla, en el que parecia que los hombres muertos, colgantes sobre el borde de las ventanas 0 sentados en los rincones, se hubieran salpicado unos a otros con su propia sangre ... vomi te ... Y ahora todo vol via de golpe." (42) Barea shows us

the

sights,

and THEN the effect on himself

(vomiting). The two are separate, whereas in Iman, Sender is much more subjective. Barea had said in the introduction to The Track:

"I wanted to describe the shocks which had scarred my mind ... (which) in different individual forms but from the same collective causes, scarred and shaped the minds of other Spani ards too." ( 4 3 ) The shocks are the same, but on each mind the shock may have a different

impact.

Thus

Barea's

particular than Sender about

objectives

made

him

more

separating the event from its

effect.

BEYOND BRUTALITY.

Barea's wri ting does not have the richness and symbolism of Sender's fiction. There is an aspect of Barea, however,

that

approaches Sender's imagination: when he dwells on the morbid. Chapter 2 has commented on the scene in Carabanchel of the 109

soldier driven mad by the rotting donkey (44). In La forja Barea used images of skulls

and reburial of corpses to

fuel his

attacks on the Church (45). In La ruta he often shows a macabre interest in scenes of violence or death. In the Ceuta hospital, where he is recovering from typhus, he recounts with zest the deaths he witnesses (46). Most clearly, attending the pre-battle parade

addressed by Millan Astray,

Barea is

fascinated by

Millan's dominance of his soldiers not by rank but by physical violence and prowess, as when Millan screams at a soldier: "Yo soy mas que tu,

i mucho mas hombre que tu!" (47).

Barea dwells on such scenes with the fascination of a peaceloving man enthralled by a darker side to his country's history and to human behaviour. He could be swept along by Millan's blood-thirsty rhetoric: " -- lQuienes sois vosotros? Los novios de la muerte. Los caballeros de la Legion. Os habeis lavado de todas vuestras faltas, porque habeis venido aqui a morir ... En vuestras venas hay gotas de la sangre de aquellos aventureros que conquistaron un mundo y que, como vosotros, fueron novios de la muerte. iViva la muerte!" ( 4 8 ) In Millan's

fanaticism

lS

a

rhetoric

which

sways

Barea' s

emotions (and he is brave to allow us to perceive this) as well as those of the 'manada de piajosos' that is the Legion (49).

This interest In the morbid stands in strong contrast to his rational self, which understood very well the forces (Church, Army, Capital) ranged against him and how to fight them, forces which he analysed in Struggle for the Spanish Soul.

In the

following passage from that book, written before La ruta, Barea Summarised the ideology used by Franco's regime:

110

"The decline of Spain began when the national consciousness was lost, and with it the spirit of universal mission ... politics bec~m~ a lu~rative business, national ambitions were forgotten, indlvldual lnterests broke up the State, anarchy ran riot ... When spain was completely exhausted, she fought her last wars and finally, a prey to inner strife and Marxist experiments sank into the degradation from which Franco and the Falang~ have rescued her." (50)

The morbid passages of the trilogy show that Barea could enter emotionally this cultural

mission

sinister world of (51).

And

it

lS

Franco's to

his

'spiri tual credit

that

and he

occasionally takes us there with the curiosity of a child (the skulls), the temporary fervour of a soldier (Millan's speech), or the dull passive self-hatred after his nervous collapse in Madrid (52).

THE ARMY.

La

ruta

contains

a

sustained analysis

portrays a world of coarseness

of

the Army.

and brutality,

Barea

in language,

views, ethics and behaviour. And he makes us feel the reality of 'this enormous brothel and

ba~'

:

" ... Es terrorificamente facil para un hombre el caer en estado de bestialidad" (53). The Army is the main institution examined in La ruta; just as in La forja

it was the Church.

Ba~ea'

s view is qui te clear and

uncontroversial: the Moroccan campaign was a rotten adventure promoted by the Army.

Like La forja,

La

ruta

lS

an accumulation of anecdotes and

stories. Among the tales of everyday corruption and swindles

111

insti tutionalised in the colonial army, plight of the common conscript,

Barea highlights the

usually the victim of such

corruption: "Aquella masa de campesinos analfabetos, mandada por oficiales irresponsables, era el espinazo del ejercito de Espana en Marruecos." (54) The narrator listens to these conscripts' stories. Some of them explain the circumstances which had dumped them in the Army. These passages of hunger and corruption in the selection of recruits echo Iman and anticipate the violence and poverty of Pascual Duarte's childhood. In his introduction to Cela's The

Hive, Barea quoted Gerald Brenan with approval: "As one reads [Spanish literature] one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that from the Middle Ages to the 18th century the note of hunger runs persistently through the novels." (55) In his later literary criticism, Barea often comments on this theme of hunger in Spain's Ii terature and on the associated question of illi teracy, citizens

could

read

which meant that so few of Spain's

those

parts

of

its

literature

which

addressed the question of their hunger. Barea understood in his own life these twin hungers, for food and for learning.

In La ruta, the Army's 'masa de campesinos analfabetos' is not only not educated; it is brutalised and decimated. But as well as showing how they are cannon-fodder and a breeding-ground for faSCism,

Barea shows us

the other,

more posi ti ve side:

the

incipient hatred and rejection of the Army by the recruits: " ... el general Ie di6 unas palmaditas en el hombro. El recluta se volvi6 como una bestia herida: -- No me toque. jMe cago en Dios! n (56) In his wholesale denunciation of the Army at all levels, Barea is as scrupulous to distinguish between the individual and the

112

institution, as he was when dealing with the Church in La forja. Just as there were priests whom he liked and respected; so there were soldiers like C6rcoles or Sanchiz he liked and officers such as Tabasco whose views are right-wing but who is correct In his treatment of others. Even when he talks of the villains of the piece: avoiding Primo's

Primo I

Millan

manicheism. slap-happy

He style

or

Franco,

illustrates (57).

He

Barea the

notes

is

rigorous

In

attractiveness

of

Franco's

renowned

courage and lack of personal corruption.

The officers fall into three categories: the her6icos, warriors like Franco full of ideas of patriotic honour and wanting to win the war at all cost; Government supporters who just wanted a quiet life; and those who desired the return of the good old days of full-scale corruption without risk.

And for this last activity there were many opportunities which started right at the top, as the anecdote quoted of the factory in Guadalajara shows. An Army contract, whether for planes or condensed milk, was a licence to print money. And all down the line, the officers and sergeants took their cut.

A

large part of La ruta is taken up with tragi-comic stories of

corruption, such as the sale of horses to the enemy, or the cook giving short rations and creaming off the extra supplies. The sergeants are involved in ingenious juggling of accounts to cover for missing stores.

113

FLAWS.

In highlighting La ruta's unity of structure, its analysis of the forces behind the Army, its polemical tour-de-force against that hopeless army, and the vivid descriptive language of the illustrative anecdotes,

flaws which prevent La ruta attaining

the stature of La forja should not be ignored.

Firstly, there is a mixture of several styles and tones in the volume. John Miller, who has written the most detailed study of La ruta, comments that it has a limited vocabulary 'con momentos

brillantes . .. a comment.

veces,

chillones'

(58).

This

lS

fair

One example of a passage which is somewhat shrill

(' alga chil16n')

MillAn.

algo

There

is

is the section already mentioned concerning plenty of

evidence

to

confirm the

exact

truthfulness of Barea's portrayal of MillAn. But on the page the literal

description

sometimes

sounds

shrill

and

forced:

a

Ii teral transcription of reali ty does not always function in fiction.

Secondly, concrete example occasionally becomes merely an excuse for an opinion or a historical resume.

The following is an

example from the chapter Golpe de estado: "Un dia me encontre con mi viejo amigo Antonio Calzada ... Estaba sin trabaj o. Su historia era la viej a historia de la prosperidad y la crisis de la guerra." (59) Barea then describes for a page the dire strai ts of office workers after the war, but of Antonio Calzada we hear no more. He remains a cipher, an example not a character. The volume is weakened by such carelessness and swerves towards propagandism.

114

The third weakness is the inverse side of one of Barea's main strengths: his use of interesting anecdotes to make a point. An example of inadequate use of anecdote is his description of the gypsy family in the train

(60).

Schematically,

this has its

place in the novel: the gypsies are smugglers, another section of the Spanish society Barea is seeking to survey. incident

comes

from

nowhere

and

goes

nowhere:

it

But the lS

too

obviously just a good story inserted into the main narrative, as would occur in a picaresque novel.

The account of the gypsies also demonstrates a fourth weakness in Barea

which would become much more damaging in La raiz

rota and in his broadcasts and articles from Bri tain in the 1940s (61). In these later years, when his creative seam was exhausted,

he often lapsed into an easy stereotyping on the

basis of race or origin.

The stereotyping of the gypsies as

criminals is a harbinger of this future degeneration.

A fifth flaw is the sentimentalism in the portrayal of his mother. This is a problem which does not jar in La forja because the narrati ve

lS

from a

child's point of view.

His mother

continues to feature in La ruta. She serves as a counterpoint of love and tolerance to the harshness of life in Morocco. She is an image of the best,

most loving of mothers. But she never

comes to life in any literary sense. Barea's objectivity deserts him when he deals with her: she is a blurred image of goodness. This inability to treat her artistically may well have been, as Jose Ortega suggests, because the fatherless Barea was obsessed with his mother as the only point of stability in his chaotic

115

world. Ortega links his mother to the image in La ruta of the fig-tree root "como origen y conservaci6n de las cosas"

(62).

Barea's objectivity in looking at himself and others breaks down when dealing with his mother.

The most striking

(and sixth)

defect In La ruta occurs when

Barea lets his anecdotes get the better of him and the book degenerates into a type of 'Confessions of a soldier.' Barea himself was a man who loved to sit in bars and tell stories. He comments in the introduction to The Track: "There are stories, true stories, which I love to tell to my friends, but have not included in this book, such as 'How I entered the Sacred City in Disguise together with the General, ' or 'How I leapt naked from a bedroom into a Moorish Cafe.' These would have been suitable tales for an anecdotal autobiography which puts the highlights on the spectacular and amusing; but to me they carried no deeper association, either personal or general, and so left them out [sic]." (63) As, very probably, Barea would have been uncomfortably aware when penning this foreword after the book's completion, accounts precisely

of his this

liaison wi th sort

of

Luisa

'suitable

the

the

brothel-keeper are

tale ... (with) ... no

deeper

association.' The story of Luisa dominates Chapter III and is a boastful piece of yellow journalism. And when purpose is lost, the style degenerates: "Se golpe6 el --GPegarte? No. cara y marcharme. --Hubiera sido silencio. -- Mejor

pecho, haciendo saltar asustado el rubi. Lo unico que hubiera hecho es escupirte a la dijo capaz de matarte que me pegaras ... " (64)

despues

de

un

This is pure melodrama. The objection is not that it is untrue. Far-fetched as it sounds, the story of Luisa may well have been true.

But it does not

fit

into the volume's

framework.

It

neither advances the account of the Army, nor of Barea's own sentimental education. And nor does its boastful tone have the 116

necessary

ring

of

truth.

The

characters

'Luisa'

and

'the

homosexual' become cliched cyphers round the dominant figure of the hero.

By

looking

at

this

rare

passage where

Barea' s

obj ecti vi ty

collapses into subjective fantasy, we can better appreciate the sustained nature of his objectivity in the rest of La ruta and the trilogy (65). At the end we do not recall Luisa, but what he succeeded in chronicling: " ... the filth of the hospital, the gory nightmare of the massacres, the technique of petty graft, the boredom of endless marches, the boredom of night life, the noise of taverns, the unquestioning comradeship of the army, the smell of the sea at dawn, and the glare of the African sun -- all this made us what we are, and this I have chronicled." (66) ******************

117

NOTES.

1. Grant, Helen in Barea, Arturo, The Forging of a Rebel, (Davis-Poynter, London 1973), introduction , p. 9 . 2. Ibid. P .10

3. FR, p.250 4 . Ibid. p.249 5. Ibid. p.285 6. Ibid. p.474 7 . Ibid. p.285 8 . Ibid. p.272 9. Ibid. p.413 10. Ibid. pp.314-316 11. Ibid. p.315 12. Ibid. p.357 13. Ibid. pp.357-359 14. Ibid. pp.358-359 15. Ibid. p.407 16. Ibid. p.409 17. Ibid. p.414 18. Alborg, Juan Luis, Ope ci t. , pp. 213-242. 19. Marra-Lopez, Jose R., Ope ci t. , p.322. 20. Barea wrote later: "I read Iman while my own experiences of the disastrous Moroccan campaign were only too fresh in my mind, and it seemed to me that Sender had expressed all the misery, degradation, muddle, and resentment of any soldier who is an unwilling part of an ugly war machine .... [Sender] served in Morocco, in the corrupt colonial army which fought the Riff War and in which he saw the lads from villages like his own slaughtered, crippled, or, at the very least, miserably uprooted for the sake of a frivolous policy of prestige, and through the ineptitude or greed of the mili tary caste." (Barea, Arturo in Sender, Ramon J., The Dark Wedding, (Grey Walls, London 1948), p.11).

21. See Carr, Raymond, Espana 1808-1975 (Ariel, Barcelona 1985), Pp.558 ff., for a description of intellectual opposition to Primo de Rivera. 118

22. Barea, Arturo, Unamuno (Buenos Aires 1959), p.74. 23. Marra-L6pez, op. cit., p.323. 24. Barea's anti-intellectualism was modified in his later work when he himself beca~e ~n 'intelle~tual' as, a Ii terary cri ti~ (See Chapter 8). But lt 1S a recurr1ng note 1n the trilogy: see for this FG y HR, op.cit., pp.73 ff .. The term 'doble insumisi6n' comes from Mario Benedetti, art. cit., p.376, and is discussed in Chapter 3. 25. FR, p.375 26. Ibid. p.376 27. Ibid. p.376 28. Ibid. pp.377-378 29. Yndurain, Francisco, art. ci t.; Aranguren, J. L. , 'La evoluci6n espiri tual de los intelectuales espafioles en la emigraci6n,' Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (febrero 1953) NO.38, p.152; Alborg, op.cit., p.227; inter al. 30. FR p.377 31. Ibid. pp.377-378. In his essay 'A quarter century of Spanish wri ting' Barea praised Valle- Inclan. "He had always been the 'absolute' artist dedicated to the cult of beauty ... [in the late '20s] Valle-Inclan, until then an aloof rebel, made a frontal attack on the Spanish monarchy, and a vast public responded to it with avid enthusiasm." (op.cit., pp.122-123) 32. Ibid. p.378 33. Ibid. p.380 34. Barea, Arturo, 'A quarter century of Spanish writing,' art. ci t ., p. 119 . 35. FR, p.353 36. Brenan, Gerald, 'An Honest Man,' New York Review of Books, March 6, 1975, p.3. 37. For these instances, see FR, p.707 ff. and p.786; and letter from Barea to W. Stirling (WAC, 23/6/44). 38. Devlin, John, op.cit., quoted in Miller, John, Los testimonios literarios de la guerra espanol-marroqui, (Gettysburg College unpublished thesis, 1978), p.158. 39. Sender, Ram6n J., Iman (Destino, Barcelona 1979), p.194. All subsequent references are to this edition. 40. FR, pp.327-328 41. Sender, Ram6n J., Iman, p. 195 119

42. FR, pp.710-711 43. Barea, A. , The Track, p.8 44. Valor y miedo, pp.36-49 45. FR, p.68 46. Ibid. p.330 ff. 47. Ibid. p.316 48. Ibid. p.315 49. Ibid. p.312 50. Barea, Arturo, Struggle for the Spanish Soul (Searchlight,

London 1941), p. 62. 51. Ibid. p.62.

52. FR, pp.707 ff. 53. Ibid. p.301 54. Ibid. p.400

Brenan, Gerald, The li terature of the Spanish people, preface, quoted in Barea's introduction to The hive, (op.eit.), p.13. Barea discussed the question of the poor's hunger for food and knowledge most fully in the opening chapter of Lorea. He also refers to the question in his introduction to The dark wedding, as well as in 'A quarter century'. See Chapter 8. 55.

56. FR, p. 3 95 57. If Barea's positive attitude to Primo de Rivera appears surprising, it should be remembered that the policy of Barea's union, the UGT, was favourable to Primo de Rivera; and that many people saw him as the man who had managed to halt the Moroccan War (not unlike de Gaulle and Algeria 30 years later). 58. Miller, John, Ope cit., p.158 59. FR, p.442 60. Ibid. pp.336-338 61. Scripts in BBC Written Archives Centre. 62. Ortega, Jose, 'Arturo Barea, novelista espanol en busca de su identidad,' Symposium, Winter 1971. 63. Barea, A., The track, p. 9. 64. FR, p.281

120

65. Gerald Brenan cast doubt on another aspect of Barea' s veraci ty. He said Barea got the geography of Morocco wrong. " ... there are some episodes [in La ruta] that he describes in the first person but which I suspect he did not witness." ('An honest man,' art ci t. ) 66. Barea, A., The track, p.9 ----------------------

121

CHAPTER SIX.

LA LLAMA: REVOLUTION. CONTINUITY WITH THE REST OF THE TRILOGY. La llama, for an unexplained reason translated into English as The Clash, is the most complex volume of the trilogy to write

about, since it involves well-known and controversial history and politics. That is also why, for the new non-Spanish reader, it is the most accessible of Barea's books. The account, in the first quarter of the volume, of the election campaign in Noves is a brilliant portrait of one small village, which yet brings into focus the complex of social forces underlying the Civil War. And the subsequent quick-fire descriptions of the war's opening days contain action sequences that Martin Scorsese would be proud of.

There are questions central to this volume which I have dealt with elsewhere. Barea's emotional reaction to the horrors of war and his mental breakdown, which were the immediate catalysts of his writing, have been discussed in Chapter 2; and aspects of Barea's political views and sincerity, in Chapter 3.

Like many novels about adolescence and a wri ter' s coming-of-age, Arturo Barea' s

trilogy ends at the point where the wri ter,

haVing been formed -- or, In this case, writing the

very novel

being read.

'forged' -- embarks on

The difference

lS

that

Barea's trilogy was written twenty years later in the writer'S 122

life than the normal 'Portrait of the writer as a young man. And therefore, although the volume retains all the freshness and spontaneity

of

that

type

of

novel,

it

also

contains

the

experience of a man in early middle-age who has already led a varied Ii fe .

Whereas the other two volumes deal in turn with childhood and coming-of-age, La llama is the book of that early middle-age. It contains the rupture, the break that both changed the private world of the author (the war made him a writer) and chopped a deep wound into his generation (no Spaniard was unchanged by this massive catastrophe). This volume also shows the crucial changes in the narrator's personali ty, when briefly he finds fulfilment

In

his

political

activity

and,

more

lastingly,

resolves with lIsa his lifelong crises of sexual relationships.

The first half of La llama provides a masterly overVlew of the events preceding the Civil War and of its opening days. The description of the electoral organisation for the Popular Front in the village of Noves are among the very best passages of Barea's wri ting. Exci ting,

full of action and contrast, they

achieve his self-set aim for the whole trilogy of describing his own development in relation to the experience of millions of Spaniards; and of illuminating those common experiences through the prism of his own activity. Up to the assault on the Montana barracks (the end of Chapter VII), Barea maintains this tension. But then the vision narrows from describing the whole to only a smaller part of the war: that part seen from Barea's job in the censorship. In the words of Jose Marra-Lopez: 123

"Ah?;a su re~ato se centra ~n la labor censora, contandonos 10 que ~lO a traves de su traba]o, por 10 que se pierde la gran oportunldad de que sea la novela de la guerra civil." (1) other critics touch on the failure of La llama to be the great novel of the Spanish Civil War. Fernandez Gutierrez & Herrera Rodrigo rebut this complaint: "Si La llama no llega a ser, por esa vislon limitada la 'novela de la guerra,' es porque su autor nunca pretendi6 qu~ 10 fuera. Se trata de la tercera parte de una trilogia ... " (2) As such, the trilogy continues to deal with Barea's own life and what he

himself

had

fel t,

seen

and

heard.

Where,

as

was

inevitable, in the middle of a cataclysmic war, his own Vlew only included a fraction of the whole, then Barea' s narrative is perforce more limited.

Nevertheless, the change in the second part of La llama to a more personal account does damage the coherence of the volume and of the trilogy as a whole.

The middle part,

the second

third, of this volume deals wi th Barea' s time in the Madrid censorship. This is of great interest to any student of the Civil War, but represents a break in continuity with the rest of the trilogy. The problem lies in Barea's change of perspective: the narrator is no longer moving between two worlds. Thus these pages

lack

the

dramatic

and

narrative

tension

of

his

intermediate position as a sergeant in the Moroccan War, when he could both see and feel what it was like to be a common soldier or a higher officer (La ruta); or of his position as a poor child in rich circumstances (La forja) .

By the second third of La llama, Barea is a leading official of the Republican Government's bureaucracy. He greets delegations

124

of visiting digni taries; he meets famous wri ters; he hobnobs with Generals

such as Miaj a,

Regier

or

'Carlos'.

Barea

is

conscious of this narrowing of focus and tries to correct it by passages such as the visits with lisa to Serafin's tavern, the death of

his

adjutant

or

the

comic

interludes

of Angel's

adventures and wound in the buttock. These are all attempts by Barea to maintain the trilogy's continuity of vision. But the problem cannot be solved just by shifts from the privileged world to a poorer environment. The whole narrative focus has changed because Barea is telling the story from a different perspective.

The final third of the novel, after his dismissal as censor, lacks continuity with the rest of the trilogy to an even greater extent. Barea's personal course parted company completely with the destiny of his compatriots, as he left the country while the Civil

War

was

still

raglng.

The

sustains the trilogy as a whole,

dramatic

structure

rooted in Barea' s

which 'double

vision' and his intermediate position in society, is broken. In the second half of La llama, Barea is only writing interesting autobiography. Consequently, La llama fails on its own terms: it 1S

a broken-backed book. This is different from bemoaning that

La

llama is not the 'Great Novel' of the Civil War. It is a

criticism in terms of Barea's own aims and in contrast with the accomplishments of the first two volumes.

Indeed for many critics, La llama, as well as being among the earliest, is one of the very best books about the Civil War. But this is to look at it through a completely different lens. The

125

historian Burnett Bolloten wrote to Barea in 1950:

" ... ?U :na?Jnifica obra ':The ~orging of a Rebel" ... contiene datos valloslslmos para la hlstorla que no existen en ninguno de los libro~ que hasta la fecha s~ han publicado ... puedo hablar con autorldad, ya que me he dedlcado a leer ... mas de mil ocho cientos libros sobre la Guerra Civil y Revoluci6n editados en una docena de paises." (3) And the International Brigader, Ralph Bates, wrote: "Barea ... has given ... a wholly credible account of the first year of the war." (4)

POLITICS.

The above two quotes are praise indeed for Barea's accuracy and sincerity in his factual account of events of the Civil War. They are justified; but his sincerity should not be accepted uncri tically. Barea' s poli tical views and actions need to be examined before we can accept his

'credibilidad'

and 'da tos

vali 05i simos' .

In 1931, after about fourteen years away from union activity, Barea became active again in the UGT,

encouraged by Carlos

Rubiera, the secretary of the Federaci6n nacional de empleados de oficina for the UGT (5). Barea's collaboration with Rubiera, a left socialist,

suggests that he sympathised with the left

wing of the PSOE, led by Largo Caballero (6). However there are other contrary indicators.

Barea's sometimes precipitous reactions should not be confused with his actual political views. He was on occasion a firebrand: as when he had stormed out of the bank in a temper (7) or when, twenty-three years later,

he took part in the attack on the 126

Montana

barracks

(8).

Certainly,

whenever

his

dignity

or

'manhood' was touched on, he reacted with passion.

But passion

and extreme

reactions

do

not

define poli tical

positions, which are based on consistent action. Barea was not a marxist,

al though he used some of the analytical tools of

marxism in Struggle for the Spanish Soul. But this means little, as several terms and categories of marxism were common parlance for all shades of the European Left in the 1930s. Unlike lisa, formed in the revolutionary movement over two decades, Barea was not a theoretical poli tical thinker.

Despi te living through

times of intense political agitation, he nowhere defines with any clarity where he stood within the left -- something quite remarkable when we consider that the very subject of La llama is War and Revolution, and that by his own

sev~ral

admissions, he

spent a great deal of time in the taverns of Emiliano, Serafin and others, perpetually arguing politics (9).

Political context (10).

To understand Barea' s poli tical views, assess this

aspect of his

credibili ty ,

and thus be able to it

is

important to

explain the political factions operating in the PSOE and its union affiliate, the UGT, hegemonic in the Madrid area among the working-class in 1936. In the PSOE there was a right-wing led by Julian Besteiro, who during the war supported the idea of a negotiated peace and was favoured by the Governments of London and Paris. The centre was dominated by Indalecio Prieto; the left by the charismatic figure of Largo Caballero, who was Prime

127

Minister from September 4 th , 1936 until May 15 th , 1937. Though primarily a union activist, Barea was a member of the PSOE at the start of the Civil War: " ... on that night of the 18th of July, 1936 ... I was not only what is called an emotional socialist. I had the membership card of a party in my pocket, I belonged to my trade union. Though I played no particular role in ei ther party or trade union -- I knew I would not be good at it -- I was an active party worker who took part in discussions and defended the point of view of my group. I tried to be disciplined and to win new members." (11) Barea was a party member during this period for the only time in his life. As the individualist and 'emotional socialist' he actually was, he was never a member of any party before the mid30s, almost certainly left the PSOE in 1936/7, and never joined the Labour Party in England, though many of his friends and lisa were members.

The Spanish Communist Party (PCE) , whose forces were small In July 1936,

grew with great rapidity. This growth was due to

three main factors: the material and moral support of the Soviet Union in the defence of Madrid; second, the PCE's own clarity of poli tical aims third,

and consequent organisational coherence;

and

the fusion of the Communist wi th the Socialist youth

(JSU) in January 1937. This fusion was preceded by, and then opened the flood-gates to,

a large number of PCE members and

supporters gaining positions within the PSOE and the UGT.

In July 1936, the rebellion of the military had been combatted, and their success ini tially hal ted, by the outbreak of a popular revolution. But thereafter, different political lines rapidly divided

forces

within

the

anti-fascist

coalition.

Broadly

speaking, the anarchists and the POUM wished to push forward and 128

consolidate the social revolution; whereas the PCE , strongly influenced by

the

Soviet Union,

sought

to

reconstruct

the

bourgeois state. Within these political conflicts, played out in the middle of a war, the hegemonic force in Madrid (Catalonia was different) and in the central Government was the PSOE.

Broue and Temime, in their history of the Civil War, explain: "In taking over the leadership of the Government, Largo Caballero had believed that his presence on its own would guarantee it against any risk of a swing to the Right and that whatever happened, Spain would remain a 'workers' republic.' But in doing so he had restricted himself to a framework that was no longer revolutionary ... The restoration of the state had opened the way to the revival of forces that had seemed definitively crushed after the July days: expropriated shareholders and proprietors, old and new officials, and representatives of political parties whose authority in the new 'popular state' tended to grow at the expense of that of the unions." (12) So it was that Caballero's prestige helped the PCE and forces within the PSOE and UGT to reconstruct a state apparatus, which hardly existed immediately after the revolutionary response to Franco's Barcelona,

July

rebellion.

After

the

May

1937

fighting

In

the PCE and the other currents wi thin the PSOE,

especially that

led by Prieto,

felt

sufficiently strong to

dispense with Caballero. He had served his purpose, from their point of view, in initially heading off the social revolution.

A year after Caballero's coming to power, Carlos Rubiera stated in a meeting: "-- Muchos espanoles hoy se preguntan d6nde estan las ilusiones del dia 18 de julio [de 1936J. GPor que no vibra la calle como entonces? Es que en la revoluci6n se ha operado un movimiento de retroceso ... Hay en Espana muchos interesados ,en paliar el impulso de la revoluci6n, en desvirtuar el contenldo del 18 de julio. Ante esto es preciso que reaccione la cl~~e trabajadora espanola. Se ha dado mucho en hablar de revoluc 7?n popular. GQue revoluci6n popular si no se efectua la revoluClon Social?" (13)

129

Rubiera was

attacking

the

PCE

and

its

representatives

and

sympathisers within the PSOE when he said: 'hay en Espana muchos interesados en paliar el impulso de la revoluci6n'. At the time of this speech by Rubiera (on September 20 th or 21 st 1937), the peE

had adopted the term 'revoluci6n popular' to try and offset

criticism

from

the

left

of

its

former

slogan

'republica

democratica Y parlamentaria de nuevo tipo'. But this did not content Rubiera, who was calling for the 'revoluci6n social' to be made by 'la clase trabajadora espanola'.

The peE had won great prestige through their identification wi th the halting of Franco's army in the outskirts of Madrid during November 1936. The International Brigades, the influx of Russian political and military advisors, the demagogic speeches of La Pasionaria,

all gave the PCE a kudos and weight beyond its

actual membership

or

political

support

within

the

unions.

Indicative of this is that it was able to move against its 'trotskyist' rivals the POUM in December 1936 in Madrid, several months before they could do the same in Barcelona.

Barea's own political development.

This then was the broad poli tical context wi thin which Barea moved: and the development of his own political views, in their contradictory aspects, can only be understood in reference to this background.

Barea' s

desire,

he

tells us several times

during the first chapters of La llama, was for a United Front of the workers (14). He welcomed the slogan, common in the February 1936 Election campaign, of 'Uni6n de Hermanos Proletarios,' the

130

unifying shout of the 1934 Asturias uprising. And he lamented, in a

cr~

de coeur:

"2,Por que los hombres de la calle, los trabajadores y los labriegos 0 mineros de Asturias 0 los camareros de cafe estaban siernpre dispuestos a unirse y sus lideres, no?" (15) , Barea expresses no awareness that the February 1936 coalition of the left was a Popular Front, not a United Front, i.e. that it included not only workers' parties but bourgeois parties such as Azana's

left Republicans.

Consequently,

he

was

not

at all

interested in POUM or anarchist criticisms of the composition of the Popular Front. However,

there is no reason to doubt his

sincerity and pride in his non-sectarianism, when he assembled a platform for the Noves meeting, which included an Anarchist, a Socialist, a Communist and a Republican (16).

The inclusion of the Communist is surprising, glven the PCE's slight

influence

at

the

time,

and therefore

suggestive of

Barea's sympathies towards the fledgling party. He tells us as much when he explains that he sought help in setting up the Naves meeting from Antonio, as well as Rubiera. Antonio was a clerk in the UGT and 'una figura menor' of the PCE (17).

The unity of that February 1936, which so inspired Barea and millions of others, was to fall apart after the start of the Civil War. And Barea's loyalty to the Communists on the one hand and to Rubiera September

1937.

on

the

Barea's

other

had become

inability

to

irreconcilable by

square

this

circle

contributed strongly to his nervous breakdown and depressions of the summer of 1937 described in La llama.

131

Let us look more closely at his development. In response to the military uprising of July 18 th , Barea was one of tens of thousands who at first milled about the centre of Madrid, then went to the Casa del Pueblo to demand arms. He took part in the decisive mass assault on the Montana barracks. Eventually, as a Morocco veteran, he found a role training a clerical workers' militia for the UGT, reiterated his believed,

to be known as the Pluma batallion. He

frustration with all

the parties,

which,

he

in building themselves, placed their own interests

above those of the cause (18). But his main anger was reserved for indiscriminate Popular Tribunals and anarchist murders

he

On August

started to work wi th the

organising the black-out

(19).

Communists

In

(20). By the end of August, he had

finished training La Pluma and entered into fuller collaboration with the Communists: "[Los comunistas] ... habia [n] dado el primer gran paso hacia la formaci6n de un ej erci to." (21) Like many others, Barea felt that the Communists were the only force seriously trying to construct an army sufficient to defeat Franco. With the authorisation of 'Carlos,' commander of the 5 th regiment,

which

in

these

Conununist mili tary power,

early

days

Barea went

was to

the Toledo

spearhead of to try and

arrange for grenades and ammunition to be transferred to Madrid. He failed, but on his return found a message from his old friend Antonio: through PCE sponsorship, he was offered a post in the Press Department of the Foreign Ministry, censoring the foreign press. He started this job at the time Caballero came to power, and held it for 14 months until after Caballero had been deposed and placed under virtual house arrest (22). 132

During the crisis of the night of November 7th 1936, when the Government left for Valencia as the Nationalists were entering the outskirts of Madrid, Barea decided to stay at his post. The press, he felt, had to be censored. He sought out the Junta de Defensa

for

orders.

He

found

the

old

socialist

Wenceslao

Carrillo, who irascibly told him: "GQue demonios se d6nde esta [la Junta]? El amo es Miaja y Miaja anda por ahi pegando tiros." (23) Carrillo told Barea to go to the 'Party' to find information. But significantly Barea's reaction was quite the opposite: "No fuimos al Partido Socialista que era 10 que Carrillo pretendia. Yo habia perdido toda mi confianza en su capacidad de asumir autoridad y responsabilidad en una situaci6n dificil ... Nos fuimos al comi te provincial del Partido Comunista." (24) Up to this moment,

Barea's political trajectory had followed

that of many Socialists,

who supported the Communists,

not

because of their overall political line, but because they were disciplined and effective, and who thought that: "Era obvio que ningun puesto de importancia en Madrid debia abandonarse." (25)

For a month after the hal ting of the Nationalist advance, Barea, while working flat out in the Censorship, was buffeted between the orders of Rubio Hidalgo insisting from Valencia that Barea was under

his

control

In

the

Foreign Ministry and

should

therefore go to Valencia; and the Madrid PCE-controlled Junta de Defensa telling him to stay in Madrid. On December 6 th , he finally

went

to

Valencia

for

three

weeks

to

resolve

the

question. llsa later joined him; when they came back at the New Year, Alvarez del Vayo, the pro-Communist Foreign Minister, had over-ruled Rubio Hidalgo.

Barea was in charge of the Madrid

censorship and llsa his deputy. 133

To reach Valencia, where his Communist sponsors were to help confirm his position,

ironically Barea had to

rely on old

anarchist friends for a car and a safe-conduct. Being a native of Madrid, a genuinely non-sectarian activist and not a party member had their advantages.

In Valencia, lIsa had her first brush with the security police. She was briefly arrested on December 27th after being denounced as a Trotskyist spy by a journalist she hardly knew (26). It was an intimation of her vulnerability as a foreigner in a position of power, who was not a member of any Communist Party. But for the first several months of 1937, both she and Arturo enjoyed the protection of the PCE and their Moscow advisers. Soviet generals, such as 'Goliev,' and Miaja, the Chief of the General Staff, supported them (27).

But by July 1937 lIsa's and Arturo's independence of criteria (as well as sheer weariness and, in Arturo's case, bad health and depression)

brought them into renewed conflict wi th the

Valencia censorship. Nowhere does Barea mention this, but his association with Caballero supporters like Rubiera would have been remembered as soon as he ceased to be a pliant tool of the Communists, i.e. as soon as he disagreed with them. And this was the period when Caballero and his supporters were being rooted out of all positions of influence.

Constancia de la Mora, Maura's grand-daughter and the new head of the Censorship in Valencia,

visi ted Madrid in August and

arranged for Arturo and lIsa to go on holiday to the Levante. In

134

Altea they received a letter from Valencia giving them "permiso i1imi tado

'para que nos recobraramos fisica y mentalmente.'"

(28). Their reaction to this polite dismissal was to return post-haste to Madrid to find that Arturo was still radio censor, by Miaj a' s

order; but they were no longer press censors or

employees of the Foreign Ministry.

Rosario,

the new censor,

introduced Barea to the new Ci vi 1

Governor, Miaja's replacement, seeking to get him confirmed in his post as radio censor. But Barea behaved badly, shouting and screaming. He could not stand the well-fed Socialist Governor and his banquet (29). Ironically, he who twelve months before had

started

to

work

with

the

Communists,

because

they

represented order against the anarchist terror and discipline against the fascist terror, now found that: " ... me lance en acusaciones contra los burocratas insensibles y reaccionarios ... Yo pertenecia a las gentes imposibles e intractables, no a los administradores untuosos." (30 )

At the beginning of October,

Barea was relieved of his work

giving talks as the Voz incognita de Madrid (31). His political work on behalf of the Republic was over. Neither in La llama nor in any other book does Barea attack the Communists explicitly (32). In this, he had more dignity than many a party renegade. But there again, he had never actually been a party member.

What is most remarkable

is

the lack of any real poli tical

comment by Barea. Nowhere does Barea make any explicit political analysis of what was happening. One plausible explanation lies in his lack of political training and thus of the intellectual

135

framework to understand the different political forces (the same could

be

said

of

Hemingway

and

Gellhorn).

Like

many

a

rank-and-file UGT militant, Barea took the peE in good faith and was impressed by their commitment and successes; he was relieved to find

the

killings,

peE

which

was so

prepared to

sickened

him,

stop of

the pseudo-judicial the

early months

of

Revolution. When he later found that the peE's order was in fact an iron control, he was too demoralised and confused to know how to act. He followed Ilsa's advice and kept his mouth shut (33).

The

less

pleasant

implication

because

it

implies

more

calculation -- is that keeping his mouth shut was the only way he could get out of Spain (34).

Blurring of Barea's sincerity.

Barea's later friend, Margaret Weeden, summed up his political views as follows: "He was the first to admit that he was no orthodox Marxist. His [Barea's] was socialism of the romantic and emotional brand, which comes from reaction against injustice and oppression." (35) This was in general, true, with the nuance made above that in 1936 he was a loyal PSOE member. But his explosive emotional reaction to political conflict should not be romanticised. For, any assessment of Barea' s political views and behaviour must include that his famed honesty, so evident in many facets of his books, is not apparent in his description of his politics. He was

an

employee

of

the

Republican

Government

during

the

suppression of the POUM In Madrid in December 1936 and later in the whole state during the period after May 1937. Nor was he

136

just an ordinary employee, but the PeE-sponsored chief censor , who therefore allowed through the censorship reports which he must have known -- or strongly suspected -- were lies about the POUM (36).

Nor was he a trained mouse. Barea was prepared to challenge journalists who distorted the news from Madrid (37); later, he was prepared to tackle Miaj a and the PCE concerning the question of telling the truth about the defeat in Bilbao (38). But his onl y corrunen t

throuahout -'

suppression of the sen t'la persecuci6n. (39)

whole

of

La

llama

about

the

is a one-liner:

P01~

" ... no

the

simpatia

ni

por

el

POUM

nl

por

su

If

But this casual comment is disingenuous. Old enemies of 11sa had attempted to have f'_e.:c imprisoned,

or worse,

as a 'Trotskyist

spy,' the code-word for being a member of the POUM! Yet he himself as censor

allowed through systematic smears and

~_aj

untruths about the ?OLM.

Barea was not a

we2-~

during this period.

man,

:Ie himself documents the phases of his

illnesses with clarity (40) political

responsic~~~ty

the Spanish

nei ther physically nor mentally,

Revolu~ion:

0

But this does not remove Barea's

for participating in the strangling of something which nei ther his

Carlos Rubiera nor Largo Caballero himself,

friend

despite all the

political errors that could be laid at his door, accepted.

It would of course be wrong to treat La llama solely in these political terms. But the case for Barea's 'passionate sincerity' cannot

be

sustained

wi thout

confronting 137

this

blur

in

his

presentation of his own political views and without explaining something of the context

(41). Thus this opinion, typical of

many, from a reviewer in The T.L.S. cannot be supported: "It, [The Clash] ~chieves that rare quality, partisanship without lntellectual dlshonesty or the distortion of the truth." (42 )

Like so many others,

Barea accepted the PCE framework,

not

because he liked it but because he saw no alternative. He was, of course, one of many: "He [Hemingway] had accepted the Communist discipline in Spain because it was 'the soundest and sanest for the prosecution 0 f the war. '" (43)

RELIABLE WITNESS.

Barea, then, was a reliable witness of the Civil War, or what he saw of it, but not a trustworthy interpreter. The strengths of

La llama emerge in other ways. One critic wrote accurately: "Barea ... is not much concerned wi th underlining the ideology of the struggle; he lets it come through the action, the characters, the scenes, the words spoken by those involved ... Nothing is more reveal ing 0 f what a Ci vi 1 war can do to people than his account of his normally honest and forthright childhood friend, Sebastian, turned assassin." (44)

Like the other volumes of the trilogy,

La

llama is full of

illustrati ve anecdotes and concrete descriptions of people Barea met and talked with. Especially in the early chapters, these anecdotes give

a mosaic picture of the di fferent poli tical

positions and pressures of the war. Here Barea's technique is no different from that used in the other volumes. It is reminiscent too of Malraux's L' espoir in its rapid changes of scene and character, a coincidence which underlines the particular aptness of this technique for describing revolutionary upheavals (45). 138

But La llama differs from L'espoir in that it is always told through the eyes of the narrator. Thus the point of view does not change; and the play of different political attitudes does not interfere with the sights, sounds and smells of the action, a difference which is a strength for action sequences, but a weakness

in

explaining

the

underlying

forces.

The

other

difference -- and this above all makes La llama a much better book than the rather dry L'espoir -- lS that Barea writes about Madrid from the inside.

The depth of reference that Barea's being an insider glves his writing sets La llama not only above the famous foreign novels of the Civil War but

also

above most of those wri tten by

Spaniards. Ralph Bates' article catches this strength: " ... [The] imagined necessity of propaganda too often [in other writers] render[s] the account worthless. Or the writer has not understood Spanish values and thus casts his protagonists after alien images of the hero and the villain ... In a revolution, ... one sees the untested ideas, the worn stock in trade of theory ... personal myths and equivocations ... subjected to the abrasion of necessity ... The whole dynamism of the revolution drifts into a new course, virtually without the participant's being aware of it. And almost invariably the ideal becomes the equivocal, and the intelligent and honest man finds himself to some degree at odds with the tenor of the enormous process. It is this I find in Barea' s account of the Spanish war." ( 4 6) Bates was an ex-International Brigader, who in this article ten years after the events, was seeking to justify the PCE's overall framework, whilst accepting specific criticisms of 'excesses' in peE conduct. But he catches the sense of powerlessness, of being

buffeted by uncontrollable events, which is central to Barea's book (47).

139

CHAPTER IX.

To illustrate these points, I want to look at Chapter IX from the first part of the volume. Just as in similar examinations of the first two pages of La forja and three pages in La ruta, this closer look will show both the care of Barea's composition and the way In which his themes are embedded in concrete action (48) •

La

Entitled

caza

del

hombre,

Chapter

different scenes in its eighteen pages.

I

IX

contains

fifteen

will mark them in this

account with a letter in brackets, which will help to indicate the speed and variation of the narrative. The chapter opens with a description of Barea' s

office

in

the days

following

the

outbreak of the Civil War (a). One of the staff had disappeared, two had gone to the front,

two German employees had vanished:

there was no work, but the remainder kept the office open. After this half-page sketch,

which includes comments on how other

workplaces were taken over by workers' committees, Barea moves to the

warehouse

where

his

brother

works

(b).

Here

Barea

discusses the use and abuse of vouchers with an anecdote of two criminals

posing

as

anarchists,

who

were

foiled

from

commandeering stock. He moves on to meal vouchers (c), the lack of cash and sales,

and Government powerlessness before the

deteriorating situation; which leads into an explanation of how fascists

and

criminals

(d)

can

easily

infiltrate

leftist

political groups in the chaos. Nevertheless, there is endless enthUSiasm, though party pride is unfortunately stronger than the spirit of unity (e):

140

"La victoria, de un batal~6n ar:arquista se restregaba en la car a de los comunlstas y la vlctorla de una unidad comunista se lamentaba Y desvirtuaba por los otros." (49) Barea moves to the story of his training La Pluma (f): "Nos dieron una casa del barrio de Salamanca que habia sido requisada y que tenia un campo de tenis donde se podia instruir a cincuenta voluntarios a la vez." (50) This quote shows Barea at his best. In an image, he gives us an idea of the revolutionary change: clerks training on a private tennis-court in the wealthiest quarter of Madrid. It is, too, a

madrileno's image: the journalists and novelists who came from elsewhere would not have taken part in such activity nor have access to such a quintessentially local reference.

From questions of poli tical uni ty and mili tary organisation, Barea then shifts back to his barrio in order to focus on the resistance of the civilian population.

Angel (g), one of Barea's neighbours, has acquired potatoes in the market and distributes them to the local housewives -- as well as keeping a quantity for his own use. In this poor quarter -- sudden shift from light relief to the most stark horror -Barea and Angel then witness the effects of a random bomb, which kills housewives, children and prostitutes indifferently (h): "Una de ellas se arrastraba sobre un vientre del que desbordaban las entranas ... me puse a vomitar en el medio de la calle." (51) Barea tells us the date: August 7th. The terrible scene inspires political

action:

Barea

goes

to

work

that

night

with

the

Communists painting the black-out (i). They come under sniperfire,

search a whole building,

Angel suggests

they go down to

141

but fail to find the sniper. see the bodies shot by the

popular Tribunals. It is the small hours and Barea is exhausted. with acute psychology,

Barea understands how looking at the

corpses of their supposed enemies and cracking wi tty remarks makes people feel less powerless (j). But also he understands they do it out of fear: " ... me impresiono terriblemente la brutalidad colectiva y la cobardia de los espectadores." (52) The scene wi th Sebastian, the childhood friend who had become an assassin, follows (k). With excessive harshness (for Sebastian has been pressured into joining the execution squad),

Barea

condemns him to his face: " ... Ile he conocido toda mi vida y siempre me ha merecido usted respeto. Pero ahora le digo ... que en mi vida vol vere a cruzar la palabra con usted.'" (53) Bareals rejection of Sebastian is overstated because of his own disgust at the

crowds he

has

seen looking at the executed

bodies. We are told baldly that Sebastian was never seen again in the quarter: a few days later he was killed at the front.

Barea I s old friend, Barea

persuades

the reactionary Don Pedro,

Antonio

to

intervene,

for

lS

Don

arrested. Pedro

has

committed no crime except that of thinking differently (1). The sight of the corpses

executed at the

river has made Barea

reflect on the injustice of the anarchist-led terror: now the news of Don Pedro's plight forces Barea to take on individual responsibility and challenge a concrete injustice.

The last five pages of the chapter take place in a ransacked church,

where

a

succeSSlon

of

people

are

judged

by

a

revolutionary tribunal. Barea and Antonio both believe that the tribunals are transgressions of justice. 142

Barea shows us the

confused lives of people from various sectors of society up against the bloodthirsty 'Manitas,' with his predisposition to believe every denunciation. Barea is able to free Don Pedro (m) and show that an accused worker has been falsely denounced (n). Comically

the

worker

leaves,

expressing

confidence

in

the

tribunal, little realising how close he has been to becoming an innocent victim of a travesty of justice.

The chapter

ends

wi th

the

Church

reminding

Barea

of

his

childhood and an image of rare peace (0): la ultima luz de la tarde se filtraba por la cristaleria de la linterna alla en 10 alto de la cupula." (54) fly

A

psychological logic drives forward these rapidly sketched

scenes. Each one impinges on the narrator and leads him to act. Thus the bomb leads to his painting the black-out, which In turn causes him to visit the executed corpses. Again, the news of Don Pedro makes him attend the tribunals and help save two men's lives.

His

having

witnessed

the

corpses

earlier

that

day

reinforces his resolve at the tribunals: the sequences of cause and effect overlap and accumulate in force.

But simultaneously,

the

narrator

lS

a

victim of whirling,

apparently causeless events. During the day and night of the chapter, there is no time to sleep. In a war, uncontrollable events suddenly occur: thus, one minute you are buying potatoes, then a bomb drops and the dead and wounded must be dealt with.

Throughout the first part of the novel, these two processes are interwoven: the psychological cause and effect which leads the 143

narrator

to

act

as

a

thinking being;

and

the

random

and

illogical nature of events, which buffet him like a toy from pillar to post.

At the same time as he shows these contradictory processes, Barea gives a multi-layered view of the concrete problems of the war.

We

see

the

corrupted

revolutionaries,

'Manitas'

and

Sebastian; and we are shown the horrors that have corrupted them, the Nationalists' indiscriminate bombing. We see people trying to go about their daily lives, in offices and streets. We see clerks drawn into weapons-training; and others disappearing -- to the front, out of the city or to their deaths.

With each anecdote,

Barea' s knowledge of the city is to the

fore. As in Valor y miedo, he names places within Madrid; and characters take on depth through their relationship to these places. Often the past is referred to, contributing to a sense of a people trying to survive in extremis in the places where they have always lived.

As was noted in analysing the structure of La forja, Barea used contrast and counter-contrast to create a complex picture of reality. Here too in La llama, he uses this method. The effect in La forja was to show the differing pulls and pressures on the child. In La llama, the effect is to give an impression, a feel, of revolutionary upheaval. These contrasts work on two basic levels: within the scene and between the scenes. Thus, within the scene: clerks in spectacles are seen drilling on a private tennis-court. The effect is one of a world turned upside down:

144

the clerks, a few weeks before, were in a bank or office and the now absent bourgeoisie

were

at

leisure with

racquets,

not

rifles, on that court. Another example of the contrasts within a scene is contained in Chapter IX's final pages, where the tribunal takes place, not in a law-court, but in an expropriated church.

By contrasts between the scenes is meant how the whole chapter moves several times from the peaceful to the violent and back again: from,

barrio

to

for example,

the

dire

the ordinary lives of women in the

plight

of

workers

suspected

of

being

'bourgeois' to the peace of an empty Church.

The overall effect is of disruption, of a society in violent upheaval and revolution. Barea's complex, realist technique (a lot more sophisticated than the Stalinist school of social realism

of

Valor

y

miedo)

lS

similar

to

two

of

his

contemporaries, who also wrote of revolution. One was Victor Serge, who never drew heroic proletarians and one-dimensional bourgeois. Serge's breadth of sympathy superficially appeared to weaken his own revolutionary argument, but in fact profoundly strengthened it by including a far broader reality. He did not only talk of revolutionaries, but also of policemen and nonrevolutionary workers, with their waverings and doubts, their suffering and wounded feelings.

Barea would probably not have read Serge's books when he wrote

La

[orja

de

un

rebelde,

but

Ram6n

J.Sender,

the

second

contemporary, was well known to him. Both Serge and the early

145

Sender of Siete domingos rOJos employed sequences of short, sharp scenes to reflect the rapid changes and mul ti tude of characters characteristic of revolutionary turmoil (55).

It is a measure of Barea's honesty as a narrator that he took such

pains

to

revolutionary

show

this

disruption,

vivid given

and

accurate

that

Barea's

picture more

of

overt

political discourse during the Chapter (and La llama as a whole) is the counter-revolutionary one of the PCE. This political discourse

is

not

explicit,

but

is

clear

from Barea's

own

reactions, comments and choices of whom to work with. At this stage we hardly need repeat, for it was Barea's method in Valor y miedo and the other volumes of the trilogy,

never

(or

only

exceptionally)

presented

that ideas are

baldly

as

overt

propaganda, but rather presented through action and discussion.

This lack of preaching, of 'predica,' in Benedetti's word, means that the reader is presented with a complete world and so is permitted to make up his/her own mind about the events (56). That is not a bad definition of a good way of presenting the truth.

LOVE LIFE.

La

llama does not only deal with the resistance of the people of

Madrid.

It also tells of Barea' s meeting,

relationship and

marriage to lisa Kulcsar, who becomes the protagonist of the second part of the volume. With lisa, Barea resolves the sexual

146

torments which have been a constant backdrop of the trilogy. This section reviews the development of Barea' s sex and love life, culminating in his marriage to lisa.

The question of sexual relations was first raised by Barea in La

forja, when Arturo is ten. In his summer in Mentrida, the boy finds freedom with Aunt Rogelia and Uncle Luis, who provide a sharp contrast to his religious aunt Baldomera, long-suffering uncle and self-sacrificing mother. "El tio Luis pertenecia a una raza de hombres que casi ha desaparecido: era artesano y senor. Enamorado de su oficio ... Se levantaba con el alba y 'mataba el gusanillo' con un vasito de aguardiente hecho por el mismo ... Y se ponia a trabajar. A las siete desayunaba, en general, un conejo guisado, dos palomas 0 alga asi por el estilo, y una gran fuente de ensalada." (57) At times during the day Luis closes the forge to make love with

Rogelia, whom he had married for love against the view of his family. It is no surprise that the boy worships this idealised figure, who lifts up the ten-year old on one hand,

lets him

drink wine 'como un hombre' and tells him: "--Debias pasar las vacaciones de aprendiz aqui en la fragua. Y menos faldas. Entre viejas y curas van a convertirte en una marica constipada." (58) Luis represents fertile masculinity. He works, eats and makes love with Rabelaisian appetite. Alongside him, Rogelia cooks, feeds the animals, makes love and gives birth with equally hard work, happiness and fecundity.

There is, however,

a more negative side to this heterosexual

healthiness. Not all is rural idyll. 'Van a convertirte en una marica constipada,' Luis tells the boy. The fear of being a marica

.

lS

reinforced by

Ines

( 59) •

The evidence that such

conditioning has worked is shown in the exaggeration of his 147

reactions to Concha (60), when she repeats the taunt, and his wild lashing out at Rogelio's sexual advances (61).

Thus Barea explains, something rarely done in any literature, how a young boy is taught to fear any sign of homosexuality. It is linked

in his

mind to

being

a

sefiori to mimado and to

religion, to the wearing of skirts like the priests. He is thus trained to feel the need to prove his heterosexuality, a trait which emerges at several stages in the trilogy. A vivid example occurs on the very last page of La forja, when, after he has resigned from the bank, it is suggested that if he apologises, he can stay. Barea replies: '" (,Pero usted ha creido que yo voy a subir de nuevo esa escalera a lamer la mano del tio ese? (,Y para que? (,Para que mi madre siga lavando en el rio? No, hombre, no. iSOY yo muy hombre para eso! '" ( 62 ) This being too much of a man to go back on his dignity, even at the age of 16, this false pride and refusal to compromise (based also on the spurious argument that he had to support his mother: spurious, because this question had not prevented his working in the bank until that moment!) is of course one of the principal stereotypes of Spanish male behaviour.

Barea's

particular

Vlew,

therefore,

of

what

a

sexual

relationship should be is founded on his memory of Luis and Rogelia, both negatively and positively. It is in part a typical machista point of view. His sexual escapades -- with Enriqueta in the bank, with prostitutes in his teens, with someone in the Guadalaj ara factory,

wi th prosti tutes and others in Morocco,

later with Maria -- are all implicitly justified by the sexual freedom he had seen in Luis and Rogelia (63). 148

If this is all there was to Barea's Vlews of the relationships between men and women, he would be a less interesting wri ter than he is. However, if Luis and Rogelia provide Barea with this conventional

and negative

view of

sex,

they

also

offer

a

positive model in their mutually fructifying partnership -- one that cannot

exist wi thout male

respect

ability

rise

exploitation

to

above

cynical

for

women. of

Barea' s

women

was

confirmed by his relationship with Ilsa. With her he enjoyed a relationship

of

equals,

based

on

respect,

like

Luis

and

Rogelia's. It lS significant that the only two moments in the trilogy when Barea does not feel himself the victim of rending contradictions are at Luis's forge in Mentrida and 30 years later with lisa in the Telef6nica.

La llama opens with Barea disgusted at his life with his wife Aurelia and his secretary Maria. Barea tells us that: "Maria era perfecta mientras trabaj ara conmigo y simpatizara con mis disgustos y problemas personales; era perfecta como un consuelo." (64) He then adds quite correctly, In one of those typical phrases revealing

his

cold

objective

perception

of

his

own

turmoil: "Indudablemente mi acti tud era fria y egoista."

inner (65)

The long-suffering Maria, whose desire was to settle down in marriage with Arturo, was dumped. When the patents office closed a few weeks after the start of the war,

Barea and Maria no

longer saw each other on a daily basis. He found her tiresome, interested only in trying to hold on to him, while already he was moving on the wider stage of the war. "Me era imposible ser amistoso con Maria cuando llamaba,al telefono y me preguntaba cuando y d6nde nos podiamos reunlr. Nuestras vidas habian llegado a un punto muerto." (66)

149

Barea describes, with typical directness and no desire to hide his own defects, one of his fateful final meetings with Maria: " ... Ilsa se colgo de mi brazo. Cruzabamos la anchura de la puerta del Sol, cuando alguien me tiro del brazo libre: '~Puedes hacer el favor, un momento?' A mi lado estaba Maria, con la cara descompuesta. Rogue a llsa que me aguardara y me separe unos pasos con Maria, que inmediatamente estallo: '~Quien es esa mujer?' 'Una ,extranj era que esta trabaj ando con nosotros en la censura. 'No me cuentes historias. Esa es tu querida. Y si no 10 es, lPor que se cuelga del brazo? Y mientras, a mi me dejas sola, icomo un trapo viejo que se tira a la basura!'" (67) Despite Ilsa's distaste for his way of being involved with Maria and his own misgivings that Ilsa might lose her trust in him, lisa and Arturo become lovers that night. Maria has indeed outlived her purpose and been thrown away like an 'old rag' ( 68) •

Chapter 1 has explained how Barea got rid of Aurelia and his children by plunging into his work, then evacuating them to the Levante. So Arturo Barea resolved his emotional problems. It was certainly not the best, nor most honest way: nevertheless, his unpleasantness is mi tigated for the reader because it is he himself in La llama who provides the basic information about his own sentimental education, many negative aspects included. Even in this most intimate of areas,

Barea sought to explain the

common problems of his generation. There is no prior example in Spanish letters of such courageous autobiographical wri ting. The result is an optimistic portrayal of the possibility of change.

He worked on all this material in the greatest intimacy wi th his translator Ilsa, which implies that he did in fact resolve many

150

of his emotional conflicts and changed his pattern of sexual relationships. With lisa he changed. And La llama is the story of that change.

SUMMARY.

The first part of La llama is as rich and subtle as any part of the trilogy. The public and personal aims Barea had set himself are triumphantly fulfilled. His own development and that of his generation are shown in the context of a social revolution. The second part changes wi th some abruptness, objective circumstances:

firstly because of

the war was too wide a canvas. And

secondly, because Barea's personal destiny to some degree breaks with that of his generation: his personal conflicts are settled and he withdraws from the Civil War.

Thus the volume's second part is more unidimensional. Barea's intermediate position in society, fostering his 'double vision which gave creative tension to two and a half volumes of the trilogy, alters, as he first becomes Censor and then (at the opposite end of the social scale) refugee.

However, it should not be forgotten that La llama remains the most vivid first-hand account of the Spanish Civil War. Fortyfive

years

later,

there

is

no

reason

to

correct

Mario

Benedetti's assessment:

" ... La llama result[a] el impacto mas certero, el documento mas convincente ace rca de la guerra civil." (69) ******************** 151

NOTES. 1. Marra-L6pez, Jose, Ope cit., p.329. 2. FG & HR, op. ci t., p. 143 .

3. Letter from Burnett Bolloten to Arturo Barea, 10/6/50. (Balloten collection, Box 10, Folder 7, Hoover Institution stanford Uni versi ty) .

'

4. Bates, Ralph, art.cit., 19/7/47. 5. FR, pp.480 and 521.

6. Bolloten B., 1989), p.840.

La

guerra

ci vil

espanola,

(Alianza,

Madrid

7. FR, p. 245

8. Ibid. pp.557-573 9. Ibid. pp.532 and 717 inter al.

10. There is no one source for this background information. I have drawn generally on the history works cited in the Bibliography, especially those by Hugh Thomas, Burnett Bolloten and Pierre Broue & Emile Temime. Helen Graham is particularly useful for the PSOE. 11. Barea, Arturo, 'The indivisibility of freedom,' Vanguard, London 1945.

Socialist

12. Broue, Pierre and Temime, Emile, The Revolution and the Civil war in Spain, (London 1972), pp. 265-266. 13. Bolloten, B., op.cit., p.840.

14. FR, pp.507 and 524, for example. 15. Ibid. p.514 16. Ibid. p.523 17. Ibid. p.522. Antonio was possibly the Antonio Calzada to whom Barea refers in La ruta (FR, p.442). 18. Ibid. pp.589-590. "El orgullo de cada partido parecia mucho mas fuerte que el sentimiento de defensa comun." , This lament against disunity and factional interest lS also present in his 1945 speech/article, 'The indivisibili,ty, of freedom, , art. ci t. . But wi thout actually asslgnlng responsibilities for those who caused disunity, it becomes an empty, abstract call. 19. Ibid. pp. 586-604 (La llama, Chapter IX).

20. Ibid. p.593 152

21. Ibid. p.607 22. FR, p.610 23. Ibid. p.632 24. Ibid. p.632 25. Ibid. p.633 26. FR, La llama, Chapter XIV. 27. In fact Vladimir Goriev.

See letter from lIsa Barea to Burnett Bolloten, 20/6/50 (Bolloten Collection) . 28. FR, p.737

29. FR, La llama, Chapter XVIII 30. Ibid. p.743

31. Ibid. p.748 32. Ibid. p.755. In this passage, Barea cites lIsa as the main intellectual influence on his keeping quiet about the PCE. Later, in Britain, it was for both of them a question of pride not to join the rush to attack the Communists. Barea did portray the PCE negatively in La raiz rota, but even so did not touch on the PCE's record in the Civil War. 33. It was a mistaken policy to keep silent, as it allowed the

PCE to (quite literally) get away with murder, but one common at the time. The Bolshevik leaders condemned in the Moscow show trials during this period thought within the same framework as lIsa Barea: that any public dissent could only damage the cause they had fought for all their adult lives. If lIsa had been the Trotskyist she was accused of -- or a POUMist -- she would have .had an alternative course to fight for within the Republican ranks. But she wasn't. She was a disillusioned but loyal exCommunist. It is not unjust to add that, like many, lIsa may have been psychologically inhibited from denouncing Stalinist persecution by her sense of guilt. She had previously, like Arturo Barea, collaborated with the persecution of the POUM and the anarchists in the sense that she allowed through the censorship false articles attacking them. She may well have reflected a few months later, when she herself came into the firing-line, that these articles had discredited the Republican side more than any hypothetical denunciation by her might have done. Yet she, would have been silenced by her own collusion in that persecutlon.

34. Hugh Thomas summarises well the disingenuous omissions by Barea which imply that his silence was bought by divorce and exi t visas: "We are made [in La llama] to feel a little sorry for Poldi,' who 'looked very ill and was suffering pain; he confessed to a serious stomach complaint rendered worse by his I

153

way of li~ing, the late nigh~s, the irregular food, the black coffee. . . But these late nlghts were caused by his endless inte[[~gat~on~ and even, tort,ures of ,alleged Trotskyists. 'My histO[lC mlsslon,' 'Poldl' sald to Katla Landau, 'is to find the proofs that, among twenty trotskyists, eighteen are the agents of Hitler and Franco.'" (Thomas, Hugh, 'Spain before the Falange', The Nation, May 3, 1975). See also the start of Chapter 2 and Note 4 of that chapter. 3S. Weeden, Margaret, 'Arturo Barea, an appreciation,' Meanjin Review, April 1959, p. 97 . 36. See, inter al, John Langdon Davies' News Chronicle articles from the time (British Library) . 37. FR, p.660 inter ale 38. Ibid. p.722

39. Ibid. p.767 40. These phases of Barea's nervous and mental collapse have been discussed in Chapter 2 in the context of the genesis of Barea's wri ting.

41. Anon, 'Civil War,' The Times Literary Supplement, 23/3/46. And see Note 34 above. 42. 'Review' in The Times Literary Supplement, 23.3.46. 43. Baker, Carlos, Ernest Hemingway (London 1969), p.413. 44. Grant, Helen, in Barea, A., The forging of a rebel, 1972), introduction, p. 11.

4S. Malraux, Andre, Man's hope, published in 1937 as L'espoir.

(London

1969),

(London

originally

46. Bates, Ralph, art.cit ..

Barea also makes reference on the Cordoba tape to his feeling of being buffeted about by events. See Appendix 5.

47.

48, FR Chapter lX, pp.586-604. 49. Ibid. p.589

SO. Ibid. p.590 Sl. Ibid. p.592 52. Ibid. p.594 53. Ibid. p.596 54. Ibid. p.604

154

55. Sender, Ramon J., Siete domingos rojos (Barcelona 1985). (Originally J?ublished in 1932.) . Serge, Vlctor, Year one of the Russ~an Revolution, Birth of our power" Conquere,d City. (London 1974-1977). (Originally published In French In 1930, 1931 and 1932, respectively.) Malraux's L' espoir (op. ci t.) also uses the technique of brief changing scenes and characters to express the disruption of revolutionary Madrid. 56. Benedetti, Mario, art. ci t. , p.380. 57. FR, p.53 58. Ibid. p.54 59. Ibid. p.38 60. Ibid. p.56 61. Ibid. p.76

62. Ibid. p.245 63. All mentioned in La forja de un rebelde. 64. FR, p.519

65. Ibid. p.519 66. Ibid. p.623 67 . Ibid. p.650 68. Barea, Arturo,

Th~ -~

~

Clash, p.222.

69. Benedetti, Mario, art.cit., p.380.

155

CHAPTER SEVEN.

BAREA IN ENGLAND: 1939

1957.

ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND.

lIsa and Arturo Barea reached England in March 1939. On the last page of La llama, Barea described his anger at the blindness of the French, among whom he had lived for the previous year, who did not want to see that war was approaching. Two French sailors corrected him: "Los dos hombres me miraron gravemente: 'Oh no. Nosotros lucharemos. Los otros son los que no 1 ucharan. ' " (1) But in practice this

class understanding of the difference

between the interests of the French and English Governments, who had allowed Franco's victory, and the working-class who did and would fight, did not last. These final words of La forja de un rebelde were written early in 1944, but already Barea's Vlews

had slipped towards a more patriotic view of England, as his broadcasts from that time show (2).

With the words quoted above, Barea's own account of his life ends. But a rich substitute for his own account are the many people still alive who knew him during the last 18 years of his life, when he became a famous writer.

In those first weeks addition

to

his

in England,

political

Barea' s mood was

bitterness

at

low.

British

'non-

intervention' in the Civil War, he felt personally wretched: 156

In

"Desemba~que

en estas is~as desposeido de todo con la vida truncada. Y Sln un~ perspec:tlva futura, ni de patria, ni de hogar, nl de traba] o ... rendldo de cuerpo y de espiri tu." (3) It was a mood not helped by his first impressions of London: " ... dos filas interminables de casas. Casas estrechas ahumadas por las locomotoras ... con sus cuerdas donde se tendia~ ropas a secar y a ahumarse; donde se amontaban cajones viejos latas vacias." (4) , Arturo and lisa went to live in a small village, Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire

(5).

In

June

1939,

The

Spectator

published

Arturo's first article in England, A Spaniard in Hertfordshire. Barea was set on earning a living from writing. He had already completed in Paris the first draft of La forja. And in the terrible month of his arrival, when the Republic finally went down to defeat, Barea wrote Mister One, a nihilistic tale of two impossible choices (see Chapter 2) . The Spectator piece told how he had found an unexpectedly warm and kind reception in rural England,

an England he had feared would be

'indiferente

0

hostil' (6).

In this very first article, Barea found the theme that would run through the more than 800 broadcasts he was to do for the BBC's Latin-American service between 1940 and 1957: that of observing and

describing

sympathetic

English

outsider.

life

lisa

from

his

articulated

vantage-point

as

a

this

in

a

approach

typically fluent and verbose letter written in July 1939, when she attempted to solici t

work for them both from the BBC' s

Spanish service: "Our concrete proposal would be to give a seri~s in Castilian, apart from the news bulletins, ~nder the headl?g ~A Spaniard discovers England.' The reason lS that .ther~ lS In Spain an old popular conception of England ... whlch lS very unfortunate, especially as it makes mor~ easy. the type of anti-British propaganda one finds nowadays In Spanlsh newspapers 157

and even more so in the oral propaganda centring round the question of Gibral tar. Now we do not suggest a series of political ~al~s, but ?f feature~,. ta~ing into account the popular pre]udlce and slmr ly des~rlblng In a vivid, anecdotical and personal manner the lmpresslons of a Spaniard of England especially its rural life, landscape, then of the liberal traditions, democratic traditions, and so on (non-political of course) ." ( 7 ) As well as showing the basic theme of the broadcasts which would give Arturo his main source of income while in England, this letter also demonstrates the couple's political dilemma. They had changed climate as brutally as an Eskimo landing in the Caribbean. From a situation in Madrid where it was dangerous not to support the Communists, they were in a position where they must not admit to supporting Communists if they wanted a job. They had to protest loudly they were not 'political,' whilst being fully aware that any broadcasts Barea might make would contain a

large

amount

of

poli tical

propaganda.

And,

most

bizarrely, Barea had to cite his experience as the pro-communist

Voz inc6gni ta de Madrid to seek work wi th the conservative BBC. It was not to be for another 15 months, when the 'phoney war had ended,

that Arturo finally gained an interview with J.A.

Camacho, Head of the Latin American service, and was taken on as a broadcaster

(8).

THREE YEARS AT FLADBURY.

In August 1939, Ilsa had started to work for the BBC Monitoring Service in Evesham, Worcestershire. Margaret Rink, who met Ilsa that month, wrote:

158

"[lIsa] ... explained to me that Arturo, who was highly strung, not at all well and very concerned about the inevitability of war, was exceedingly upset at losing her companionship and help." (9) Arturo rapidly followed lIsa from Puckeridge to Fladbury, a tiny village near Evesham, where he, lIsa, lIsa's refugee parents and Margaret Rink shared a rented house for the next three years (10). It was at Fladbury that Barea wrote the second and most of the third volume of the trilogy, his book on Lorca and several stories and articles. It was his most fertile period. In the peace of a particularly plentiful corner of rural England, where it was sometimes hard to believe a war was being waged in Europe, Barea reaped the harvest of his struggles to survive In Madrid, Barcelona and Paris (11). For the year until he started his broadcasts in October 1940, he had nothing to do but "potter round ... a large and very neglected garden" (12) and write.

"The Bareas had a very wide circle of acquaintances -- not only refugees and journalists, but distinguished writers and academics, many of them members of the Monitoring Service, and we had a fairly frequent stream of visitors, many of them lured by Arturo's reputation as a cook!" (13) Barea was the sort of cook who made huge, delicious paellas or chicken dishes to his own recipes, but left heaps of washing-up, which he considered beneath his dignity to touch. Many of the talented foreign intellectuals who worked with lIsa visited for both the fine food and fine conversations: Martin Esslin, Isabel de Madariaga,

Leonard Shapiro,

George Weidenfeld,

Ernst Gombrich and the young

who remembered Barea' s "Inca face,

chiselled, wi th deep-set eyes"

finely

(14). Barea was looking better

than he had in the Civil War.

159

Fladbury was a multilingual, argumentative household (15). They argued about politics (Ilsa's father, Professor Pollak, was an Austrian social-democrat) and about literature -- for example, whether For whom the bell tolls should be cri ticised or not. Many people thought Hemingway was too good a friend of the Republic to criticise, but Barea stuck to his view and produced his key article on Hemingway, published in Horizon.

Apart from these first contacts with the glistening literati, Barea visited the country pubs, where he felt at home chatting and drinking -- he was a heavy drinker -- with the locals. This was a continuation of a lifelong habit of drinking in popular bars. For his writing it was vital: it had helped him grasp the speech and opinions of workers in Madrid, which served as the basis for his novels. In England it was to be key in the success of his broadcasts. But popular pubs also filled a psychological need in Barea: conversation

to escape from middle-class and intellectual

and

ground

his

thought

and

conversation

in

experience.

Barea's creative and bucolic new life during this period was not without anxieties.

A

friend observed that they had "hard times,

with four of them living on lIsa Barea' s salary" (16). Barea, as an 'alien,' had problems arranging a pass to travel to London for his interview with Camacho in July 1940

(17). Margaret

Weeden (nee Rink) wrote: was just a bundle of nerves when I first knew him. He depended enormously on tobacco ... He had a limp, and was too nervy and jumpy to learn to drive." (18) !lA.

Spectres of internment as an alien, or even deportation, were

160

real. When he did start working for the Latin-American service, he feared arrest when travelling at night to his broadcasts (19). In a letter he implied that his nerves were frequently a problem: "He pasado una semana bastante molesto con mis nervios." (20)

Barea must too have suffered intense anxiety and guilt about his family in Spain. His brother Miguel was imprisoned after the fall of Madrid: he died shortly after his release, in 1941 or 1942 (21). Both his sister Concha with seven children and exwife Aurelia with her and Arturo's four were living in poverty (22). In La raiz rota Barea puts into the mouth of Pedro, the son of the exile Antolin, these words which he may well have felt could apply to him: " ... the man who had left them to starve on charity lentils and on slops of water and sawdust, and had never once spared them a thought!" (23 )

One of their many guests at Fladbury,

the elderly Sir Peter

Chalmers-Mitchell, ex-consul at Malaga and hispanophile, both offered to translate La forja and found a publisher for it (24). Another

visitor

Cyril

Connolly

commissioned

articles

and

accepted stories for Horizon. In London, a meeting with Tosco Fyvel led to Struggle for the Spanish Soul. Despite the gloomy impression Barea's physical and mental state made on Fyvel, the latter perceptively remarked: " ... the memory of a bitter defeat we had tried to forget is brought back to our minds [by Barea], with understanding but no bitterness." (25) It was surely this lack of bi tterness that allowed Barea to survive mentally and to write so clearly and powerfully during

161

the years

at

Fladbury,

the

centre of his

richest creative

period. In La llama there are several instances when, describing himself, he seems literally mad, shouting at people, behaving impossibly (26). But he had the strength to get these feelings out of his

system in

flares

of

emotion,

sometimes

in the

immediate term self-defeating, but which meant that in the long term he did not carry the seed of self-destructive rancour In his heart. Ralph Bates wrote in a 1947 review of The Forging of

a Rebel: "In part, insight into his own condi tion has prevented Barea losing himself in rancor. Sick of a terrible neurosis ... he consciously refused to rationalise." (27)

BEGINNING TO BROADCAST.

Unexpectedly, just as one world was opening up for him with his writing,

yet

another

career

began.

Accepted

by

the

BBC's

Latin-American Service, he began to broadcast in October 1940 as Juan de Castilla,

a pseudonym adopted to protect his family

within Spain from possible reprisals

(28). The radio brought

Barea renown and financial security for the last fifteen years of his life.

Camacho offered him work on a freelance basis wi th a clear brief:

to give talks on England and the English people to

counter Nazi propaganda in South America (29). It was a chance for Barea to return to some sort of political activity against fascism. He would have preferred the Spanish Service, but they would not have him.

There is no record of what the Spanish

162

service thought of his original 1939 application (30), but a controversy a year later made the BBe's general attitude quite clear.

This controversy started with Ilsa Barea, from her position as a foreign broadcasts monitor, criticising the Spanish Service as crypto-fascists for their failure to attack the Franco regime. The row broke into the press, with a letter from Arturo Barea in the New Statesman and an article in the Daily Herald (31). The BBC, "while it was anxious to act in the national interest, was also concerned wi th its own credibili ty" (32). The BBC' s dilemma was that it wished to support Bri tish Government policy of maintaining diplomatic relations with Franco, so as to prevent him entering the war on Hitler's side; yet, not to criticise Franco was hardly likely to keep any listeners In Spain and was just not credible in an anti-fascist war.

This was

a

problem

solved by Rafael

Martinez

Nadal

in

a

particular way. Under the pseudonym of Antonito Torres, Martinez Nadal made popular weekly Sunday broadcasts for the Spanish service. He never attacked Franco by name. "[Nadal attacked] ... the more outrageous utterances of the official Spanish press and radio, ridiculed Italian fascism and painted a picture of Hitler as the 'enemy of the Catholic belief in the supreme value of the individual.'" (33) Despite the mildness of this approach,

the BBC removed Nadal

from the radio in December 1943 for 4 months at the request of Lord

Templewood,

the

British

Ambassador

In

Madrid

(34).

Templewood was being pressed by Madrid, who naturally enough maintained that,

far from being crypto-fascists, as Ilsa had

maintained eighteen months previously, the BBC Spanish Service 163

staff were in fact communists. The nature of the BBe' s much vaunted independence was demonstrated by their notorious (both undemocratic and factually untrue)

reply:

"We do not employ

Reds." ( 3 5 )

It is clear that neither of the ex-Republican press censors had the slightest chance of being employed by the Spanish service, for which Barea la

voz

incogni ta

de Madrid was more

than

qualified, in this atmosphere of appeasement of Franco.

The Latin American serVlce was next best and Barea grasped his chance.

His

second or

third broadcast,

Los

se~s

elefantes

blancos, went out in October 1940 (36). This apocryphal pub, a

composi te of those he frequented at Puckeridge, Fladbury and then Faringdon, became the scene of many of his anecdotal talks. "He had a remarkable capaci ty for picking up i terns for chats in the local pub or from friends or even a few lines in a newspaper, and making them into a 15 minute talk." (37) The source,

therefore,

of much of his material was ready to

hand: his time drinking and chatting with local people. His difficulties with English presented little obstacle.

The broadcasts, in Barea's words "cuentecillos y charlas," were usually anecdotes about English life, chats set in pubs, often revealing peoples' understated but heroic attitude to the war, or about people he met, whether gypsies, neighbours or country laborers. During the war years, many were direct commentaries on the news, including satires on the German leaders, often using information

gleaned

from

lIsa

broadcas ts ( 38) . 164

who

was

monitoring

their

At first Barea went in the middle of night to broadcast live at 3 a.m.; but as time passed and recording techniques improved, he was able to tape his talk during the day. They were

14~

minute

slots, for which Barea wrote the script, during the war years sent them for censoring to his controller and then recorded the talk.

Barea' s surviving BBe scripts are of Ii ttle Ii terary value, though they are interesting social documents (39). They are not on the whole about Spain, but there is a thematic continuity with the trilogy. He was interested in what went on beneath the surface

in

the minds

of

the millions.

One of Barea' s

BBC

controllers, H. Lyon Young, explained something of the content and style of Barea's talks: "Perhaps the best way of describing Barea's commentaries would be to say that they are talks on trivialities in relation to world affairs. In other words, how the ordinary man reacts to world news, and the importance often attached to insignificant events at the time of great emotional strain. Barea catches the mood of the moment and writes on the thoughts of ordinary men and women, rather than on their deeds ... He always emphasizes (that hackneyed phrase) the 'human angle,' e.g. Molly breaks a teacup on 'V-J' Day, and ever after 'V-J' Day will be remembered by Molly's broken teacup." (40)

Lyon Young's comments are applicable to how Barea treats major political events in the trilogy. In La ruta, for instance, the proclamations, battles, turning-points and news from the capital fil ter down from a blur above into the daily current of the detail of the soldiers' lives on which Barea focuses. But the difference was that by the time of the broadcasts the political purpose of revealing how ideas were formed in the minds of rankand-file soldiers or workers had been lost. The form, the method remained the same; but by 1946 the purpose was not political, 165

but

just

to

tell

an

interesting

story

within

a

general

humanistic framework.

They were written and broadcast with skill and professionalism: "His timing was instinctive -- he never made them too short or too long and usually sat down and typed them out the night before they were needed. n (41) And in a criticism of Barea in an internal memo, the Head of the Latin American service underlined his ability as a broadcaster: "[Barea is] ... beginning to form mannerisms and to adopt a slightly 'sing-song-y' manner, which is quite different from his old style on which his reputation in our service was based. I think it would be worth while to give him a word of warning. His material is too good to spoil by bad delivery; this is especially so when we know that he can do his stuff very well indeed." (42) Presumably Barea corrected this fault, for he went on to win the listeners' poll as the BBC's most popular broadcaster to Latin America several years running in the late '40s and '50s. Just after his sudden death,

his widow replied to the letter of

tribute from the BBC' s Director of External Broadcasting In these terms: "Perhaps he [Arturo Barea] really achieved what he hoped to do: to forge a link between this country, which he loved, and people of his own language overseas." (43)

After the war the immediate propaganda purpose of the talks changed. But Barea continued to see his role as an interpreter and defender of the English way of life. In 1955, he wrote: "I still like doing them [the broadcasts] because I continually discover new things about this country of which I want to speak to people of my own language as to friends .. I can only hope that I have made them share some of my affectlonate discoveries among 'the English'." (44)

166

Throughout his time with the BBC, Barea -- or usually lisa on his behalf -- tried, without success, to get his short stories accepted for broadcast. Two had been rejected in August 1940 before he started (45). Another called The winner was rejected by novelist

P.R.Newby

for

the

Third Programme

in

1953

as

"conventional and overlong" (46). The same controller rejected The

Scissors as "unbearable"

(47). Early in his broadcasting

career, Barea called several of his broadcasts 'stories': and though the distinction between an anecdotal chat and a story may be blurred, none of the broadcasts in the BBC archives can be called 'stories' in any real sense. After Barea's death, lisa continued to try to get his stories broadcast, with one success,

Grandmother's lesson, a translation of La leccion, accepted in November

1958.

The

same

controller,

George

Macbeth,

then

rejected two more.

But Barea did do other things for the BBC: a 12-part series on

Education

for

democracy towards

the

end of WW2,

visits to

factories, literary talks, including one on Chilean Nobel prizewinner Gabriela Mistral

which he

feared was

"tal vez ... un

poqui to sentimental" (48). Sentimentali ty was a trait in much of his broadcasting.

Part of his popularity was based on his

ability to tap this sentimental vein in a popular, journalistic style,

well-tailored to Barea' s somewhat hoarse yet direct,

honest-sounding delivery (See 'Senora Smith' in Appendix 4). It is a vein which comes to the fore in the 1950 newspaper article

Los inefables viejecitos and in his portrait of Mary in La raiz rota.

167

In April 1943,

the Monitoring Service moved from Evesham to

Caversham on the outskirts of Reading. lisa moved with it, from Fladbury to Rose Farm House,

near Mapledurham,

even today a

small startingly isolated village by the Thames, although only two or three miles from Caversham. Arturo followed in October and finished the trilogy at Mapledurham in early 1944 (49). Here Gerald Brenan Wiltshire,

and

visits

Gamel

Woolsey

reciprocated

by

came lisa

to

visit

them

and Arturo

on

from two

occasions. Barea and Brenan got on well: the latter had just published the work which made him famous The Spanish Labyrinth, reviewed rigorously and sympathetically by Barea in Horizon, September 1943.

Thirty years later Gerald Brenan wrote this

vivid portrait of Barea: "[Barea] was a dark, slight man with a lean, rather worn face -- not in the least the type of Spanish intellectual, but suggesting rather a mechanic. The sort of man one would run into in any Madrid cafe or bar ... He talked well in a serious, straightforward way, but needed frequent glasses of beer to keep him going. He had developed a strong liking for the English country because of its peace and tranquillity: he enjoyed talking in pubs with the local people and growing vegetables in his garden, but his experience in the war and the spate of executions that had followed it had saddened him. Also he missed Spain and the society of his fellow countrymen. Otherwise he was very like his books, truthful and serious and without recriminations or hatred. (50) If

After 4/10/43, when Barea moved from Evesham to Mapledurham, he recorded his talks in London; though for several months after June 1944 he reverted to recording in Evesham because of the recurrence of his shell-shock -- vomiting and nausea

on

hearing air-raid sirens on his visits to London. From the end of the war, the Friday recording at Bush House was re-established, a routine he maintained for the rest of his life. He formed the habit of Friday lunch at the Majorca,

168

a restaurant in Brewer

street run by Spanish anarchists (51). And, after about 1950, he would stay over in London most Thursday nights with his niece Maruja (52).

After lIsa's resignation from the BBe in 1945, the Bareas lived for a brief period in Boar's Hill, Oxford. Here he met Salvador de Madariaga, wri ter, professor at Oxford and ex-Minister of the Spanish Republic. The publisher Joan Gili, who became a friend of Barea's, commented: "I cannot think of two more different characters, ln their background and politically." (53) Madariaga was patrician and monarchist:

Barea,

plebeian and

Republican. But most of all Madariaga had preferred exile to staying in Spain during the war and had sought to reconcile the two sides, a position anathema to Barea (54).

POLITICAL EVOLUTION.

Over these years of literary success, Barea's political views evolved.

The

anti-fascist propaganda of his war broadcasts

extolled the courage and tolerance of the British people. In a process not too dissimilar from Orwell's, Barea moved to the right, blurring the key distinction between British Government and British people. His liking for the workers, country laborers and gypsies who at first populate his fictional pub coincides more and more with praise for Britain as a whole. In La llama Barea defended democracy from the point of view of independent working-class action, but by the middle 1940s he had come to identify

it

with

what

he

perceived 169

as

the

democratic

institutions of the British state (55). This political shift was based on the Bri tish Government's stern resistance to Hi tIer after

1940

and,

Government.

Thus,

later,

the

promise

of

the

1945

Labour

for Barea as for Orwell and so many,

the

Spanish War, as it receded into history, became a sort of bubble of radical hopes and attitudes, with less and less practical impact on his own day-to-day opinions and practice.

Barea's over-sweet view of the virtues of the English reflected genuine gratitude for the welcome he had received in England, which led to his acquisition of British nationality in 1948. Becoming a Bri tish ci tizen may have been due

also

to his

speculation about a possible return to Spain: Antolin, his alter

ego of La raiz rota, acquired a British passport to cover his visit to Madrid. During the writing of this novel from 1948 to 1950, the question of a return must have been on Barea's mind.

He was careful during the

1940s not to become involved in

politics, both because he worked for a staid institution, the BBe, of whose right-wing views he had had direct experience, and because he was an alien in wartime. But in 1945, two pamphlets give evidence of the evolution of his formal political views. On 31/3/45 Barea made a curious speech at the Caxton Hall, London, which was published in a pamphlet Freedom for Spain.

The speech/article

starts

by evoking the

"spontaneous mass

solidarity ... one of the most stirring things I have ever seen" (56)

of

the

immediate

response

to

the

July

1936 military

rebellion. Barea argues that that mass moved with a single mind:

170

"That night there existed no political shades of opinion no ideological differences, no party discipline which might hav~ split us." (57) He praises the International Brigades' terms.

But he

then veers

sharply

from

sacrifice In similar this

exposi tion of

revolutionary unity to comment: "In the ranks of the International Brigades were men of all social classes and of all creeds ... A faith, or ... a religion ... moved the volunteers in the anti-fascist fight of Spain." (58) It is plainly untrue that the International Brigaders came from all social classes or creeds. But Barea uses this as the basis for arguing that "the liberty of the individual human being" lS what underlay their idealism. His own socialism he defines in the most general of democratic terms: " ... a universal fai th and universal militia, into whose ranks belong all those who believe in the equality of rights and the liberty of men." (59)

These woolly, vague generalities, in what was probably his last (and perhaps only) political speech In public, are a long way from the sharpness of his analysis four years previously of the ideological roots of Francoism in Struggle for the Spanish Soul. There are really two speeches in one: a call for international working-class solidarity, which he then seeks to pull into a nebulous "all men of goodwill" framework.

But there is a purpose to Barea's argument. He is seeking the broadest possible popular front for the overthrow of Franco: "It would be grlm indeed and it is impossible to tolerate that it should be so -- if , after the defeat of Nazism . . in the military field, Fascism in any form were to surVlve In Spain." (60) His speech -- surely made under a feeling of obligation, given that Barea did not enjoy public speaking, and even less so in 171

English -- aimed to contribute to the pressure on the Allies to overthrow Franco in the wake of the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler.

The second 1945 piece of political writing is the much more weighty and serious pamphlet SPAIN in the post-war world, cowri tten wi th weight,

Ilsa,

who doubtless

contributed the poli tical

and published by the Fabian Society in August, very

possibly through Barea's friendship with Lord Faringdon. Like the Caxton Hall speech, this was written in the heady days when the Spanish diaspora could not believe that the victorious Allies

would

not

move

against

Franco.

Barea

catches

this

atmosphere in La raiz rota: "With all the others, Antolin had firmly believed that twenty-four hours after the German collapse the Franco regime would cease to exist ... More people than before came to the meeting-place at the corner of Dean Street [Soho, London], other people than the waiters and musicians ... he wanted to explain the atmosphere of those days, their overflowing excitement, their fantastic plans." (61)

The Bareas' pamphlet argues for the restoration of the Spanish Republic. It is a stodgy, poorly written text, the house style of Fabian Research pamphlets, composed in the sombre tradition of the Webbsi but in the Bareas' case the style also reflects strains in their arguments.

For the Bareas argue that German capital, by canny use of the patent laws (here Arturo draws on his own experience), Spanish front-men and conscious Nazi-inspired infiltration,

gained a

predominant position in the Spanish economy during the 1920s and '30s. Their case is exaggerated: German capital had grown in

172

~-....~ ~-~~---

influence, but Bri tish and French capi tal retained important investments

in

Spain.

Unnecessarily

the

authors

use

this

argument of German infiltration to underline their case that the Republic should be restored. They sense that the basic moral argument that Spain is a blood-drenched dictatorship which had overthrown an elected Government will not be sufficient. Their argument seeks to link the Spanish regime with defeated Germany.

In 1945 all sectors of the Spanish opposition were manoeuvring for position against Franco's fall. Carrillo and Claudin were returning euphorically from Moscow to Paris to organise the 'interior'; Prieto was seeking audiences with Ernie Bevin; the pretender Don Juan was throwing his bi-coloured hat into the ring, seeking to appear liberal to the Allies and trustworthy to the dictator. The Bareas, the Fabian Society and Lord Faringdon were some of many trying to get the new Labour Government in Britain to move on the question. But all to no avail: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had already decided that Franco should stay. And the new Labour Government was quick to fall in line behind u.S. foreign policy in return for the Marshall millions. The moment of possibility, April/May 1945, had passed: by the time of the Bareas' pamphlet in August, the armed French maquis, with its tens of thousands of Spanish Republican volunteers, was already disarmed on Stalin's orders.

SPAIN

~n

the

post-war

world

is

mechanical,

making

the

Subjectivist error of starting from its political desires rather than from objective reality. Nearly everyone shared the Bareas' conviction that Franco had to fall. But their somewhat cranky

173

(highlighting

patents

laws)

and

conspiratorial

(German

infiltration) arguments do not make the pamphlet either a verv creditable piece of research or an inspiring read.

For Arturo Barea,

the consolidation of Franco in power after

1945 was a "shattering disappointment"

(62). From then on his

political attitudes veered towards pessimism. At Labour Party annual fairs in Buscot Park, he played the clownish role of a Spanish fortune-teller

(63),

but he did not join the Labour

Party, unlike lisa, who became a leading local Bevanite (64).

On his visi ts to Denmark,

Pennsylvania and South America he

remained proud to call for the downfall of Franco and identify himself as a Spanish Republican, but no longer as a Socialist. He retained no belief in the efficacy of political action. Olive Renier noted in a diary after a lunch with Arturo Barea in 1950: "Arturo is deeply discouraged. He says that there is no hope anywhere. In his youth one could still look forward, but now we have killed all faith. The state is all-powerful, the individual has no chance. He sees no point in political activity because there is nothing you can say to people on any of the important matters which is true. You can only redress little errors, and for the rest tell lies." (65) He sounds more like Philip Marlowe, the lone moral man, rather than Largo Caballero. The eloquent Olive Renier commented on this pessimistic passivity: "I suspect that for Arturo the defeat of democratic spa~n was the end of poli tics, and the above was more or less hls attitude ever since he had to cross the frontier into France ... All else was useless, save only that one must be true to oneself. He did not tell lies." (66)

174

FARlNGDON.

By June 1 st 1947 the Bareas were installed, with lisa's parents and (a few months later) Arturo's nieces,

first Leonor then

Maruja, in Middle Lodge, Faringdon, in South Oxfordshire. This was the exile's final home. Middle Lodge was (and is) an elegant house, at that time without electricity, by one of the entrances to Lord Faringdon's Buscot estate. It is shielded from the road by a high wall and set in a wild garden merging into the estate

woodland.

At Faringdon, Barea continued to write, but with less intensity and volume.

In these years he wrote Unamuno wi th Ilsa,

stories and essays, recomposing and Buenos Aires

a:1d his novel La raiz rota,

addi~g

wi:~

versions of his books from the English

as well as

to La forja de un rebelde for its 1951

publicat~on,

lisa were cavalier

some

the first in Spanish. Both Arturo and

their papers, which meant that Spanish

~ad

vers~ons

to be at least partially re-translated because Barea's original manuscripts

had been lost (see Appendix One) .

At Faringdon, Barea got to know a new generation, Ilsa's young Labour Party colleagues, and to them appeared mellower and more relaxed than the

mela~choly

figure described a decade earlier by

Delmer or Fyvel. He dined too with the great and good, meeting the Cabinet Minister Susan Lawrence at Buscot House and John Betjeman inter al at Faringdon House (67).

175

He liked to shoot pheasant, accompanied by a black dog he had acquired, in Lord Faringdon's woods and enjoyed telling their many guests that he, child of the Madrid slums, had entertained a genuine 'milord' on pheasant shot in his own woods and, to boot, the Lord had then done the washing-up (68). He frequented the local pubs, always looking for material (or that, perhaps, was the excuse) for his broadcasts and enjoying effects such as asking for bear instead of beer in the Wellington, Faringdon, on his return every Friday night from Bush House (69).

Barea's English was good enough for him to read extensively in the language. He had been a press censor; in Senora Smith he comments that he devoured the English classics; and he reviewed books such as Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth for Horizon and others for the TLS. But his pronunciation was always appalling, based often on Spanish rules

and the

fact

that his

first

spoken

English had been in country pubs (70). Brenan says he spoke with a Worcestershire

accent,

confirmed by Margaret Weeden,

remarks on his pronunciation of pub as poob, conjoining Several

Spanish

witnesses

pronunciation suggest

he

with

tended

local to

thus

happily

dialect

play

up

who

his

(71). bad

pronunciation in order to confound his BBC-accented visi tors (72) •

Weidenfeld describes Barea turning up at BBC functions in the early '40s dressed in slippers and trousers and jacket that neither matched nor fitted (73). Relatively poor as he was at that time, it is hard not to think Barea was making a deliberate point about the sort of person he was. In Faringdon, he nearly

176

always wore

a

beret,

old pullovers

and

a

raincoat,

again

Suggesting adoption of roles as a foreign eccentric and a loner (74) •

TRIPS ABROAD.

By the time lisa and he settled in Faringdon, Arturo Barea was a well-known writer.

The

successful on its post-war enjoy some of the fruits

trilogy was

widely respected and

u.s. publication. He was able to of literary fame.

invi ted to lecture in Denmark,

In 1946 he was

where he had a considerable

following (the trilogy had been translated to Danish by lisa's sister). While there he called for sanctions and a blockade against

Spain

(75).

A group

of Danish

intellectuals

later

mounted a newspaper campaign for him to be awarded the Nobel Prize (76). Given that he was neither Danish nor an outstanding writer, this seemed and seems curious; but is not so surprising, given a certain Scandinavian influence on the Nobel Prizes and that the Literature Prizes are often used as political gestures. Barea was internationally the best-known Spanish writer of the time and he was an opponent of the regime.

But his moment

passed; and the wri ter himself dismissed the campaign as not credible ( 77) .

In 1952 he went

for

a

six-month visi ting professorship to

Pennsylvania State College in Pittsburgh, not bad for someone who had left school at 13. Indeed he filled in on his Penn. State records card that he had been awarded a B.A. in 1913 -- at the age of 15! He travelled without lisa via New York, arriving

177

in February 1952.

four courses In 19 th and 20th

He taught

century Spanish literature and wanted to stay on for another year. But he was harrassed, along with other teachers, by the American Legion and Amvets as a 'red.' He was either not offered a renewal of contract or declined one (78).

While in the U. S .A.

he continued to record his BBC talks,

travelling to New York once a month to record four at a time under the impressions

title

"Commentary from America"

from

the

United

States

lS

(79). one

Among his

interestingly

evocative of Lorca: how in the New York traffic you feel like you are "falling into a moving machine which is trying to devour you." ( 8 0)

Towards the end of his life -- indeed the last time he left England -- the BBC sent him on a 48-day trip to South America (81). The 1951 Buenos Aires publication of the trilogy in three

volumes sold 10, 000 copies in the first few months.

It was

followed by Lorca and La raiz rota, bringing him into touch with a Spanish-speaking audience for the first time. Barea' s tour was his apotheosis; he was feted on an emotional wave of sympathy and gratitude for his books and broadcasts. He arrived in Buenos Aires by plane on 15 th April, 1956, later spending four days in Cordoba and four in Mendoza, before going to Santiago de Chile and Montevideo both for a week, reaching London again via Rio on June 1 st . His time passed in a constant round of interviews, lunches and lectures. In Buenos Aires he was housed

in

the

Casa

del

escri tor,

178

headquarters

of

the

Sociedad argen tina de escri tores.

The report of the Bri tish

Embassy in Buenos Aires explained: "[Barea's] main difficulty feted, ,celebrated a~d w~r~ed to enthuslasts ... Barea s VlSlt was word go. I would not hesitate successful visitor we have had

in Argentina was to avoid being death by hordes of admirers and an unqualified success from the in saying that he was the most for many years." (82)

His visit also attracted the attention of the Spanish regime, its embassies and supporters, who mounted a counter-campaign, sneering at the "escritor ingles, Arturo Beria," referring to his acquired nationality and the supposed coincidence of his name and views wi th those of Stalin's henchman Montevideo

press

a

comical

controversy

blew

(83).

up

In the

concerning

comments Barea made about the famous aviator Ram6n Franco, the first person to fly from Spain to Argentina and brother of the dictator. Barea had known Franco in the 1920s and remarked his habi t

of flying In the nude during the Moroccan war,

which

offended certain supporters of Ram6n Franco's brother (84).

The reports of the various embassies to Madrid were, as could be expected,

not

complimentary.

They

noted

that

Barea mainly

tackled literary themes, but did not avoid political ones when they arose. In Santiago, where he gave lectures on Unamuno and the contemporary Spanish novel, the leftists who went to see him were apparently disappointed at

his

not being sufficiently

leftist: "Respondiendo a su nacionalidad bri tanica adquir,i,da, Barea ha hecho gala de una ecuanimidad y de una ponderaclon que no podia satisfacer ni a tiros ni a troianos." (85) This hostile witness underlined that Barea was not politically very forthcoming and implied that he lacked 'spark': the other arnb assadors

thoug h t

' t h lS

t 00.

The Ministry concluded,

179

wi th

disdain for an inadequate enemy, that Barea was not worth the trouble of a more concerted campaign. He was not to know of these assessments. He was never to return to Spain, but his reception in these Spanish-speaking countries moved and pleased him (86).

And he mattered to the people he met. Rodriguez Monegal wrote: " ... las mul ti tudes que 10 escucharon y rodearon en su j ira los nuevos amigos que traian libros 0 programas de radio par~ firmar, los viej os amigos que vol vian a encontrar al hombre despues de las vicisitudes de tantos anos, recibian de el, de su voz, ese mensaje de fe en la vida que no se expresaba por cierto en palabras abstractas sino en la descripcion, menuda, cotidiana, de un puebli to, de un paj aro en primavera, de un arbol incordiado por el otono." (87) The warmth of his reception in South America melted, at least temporarily,

the pessimism and fatalism he had expressed to

Olive Renier and in La raiz rota.

LAST YEARS.

In his personal life too,

during his last ten years,

Barea

seemed to find contentment, or at least reconciled himself to his situation. Joan Gili wrote: "They complemented each other beautifully. She [~lsa~ v: as the brilliant intellectual, and he [Arturo] was the lntultlve eye of say' I am a camera' of Christopher Isherwood." (88) Olive Renier considered: " ... he was not a particularly amiable man, ?fte~ grumpy, an~ quite liable to take offence. The centre of hls llfe was llse, he believed totally in her integrity and her commitment." (89)

However, lIsa herself was neither especially well, nor happy, during these years, when an independent career for her failed to 180

take off (see Appendix 3). It is possible that she and Arturo grew apart.

Some observers

fel t

that

she exerted too much

control over her husband: she intervened in the lives of his nieces (90) and talked too much at meetings where he had been invited to speak (91). There are rumours that he became involved with another woman

in

Pennsylvania

and that

he

considered

staying with her in America; but that after leaving Aurelia for rlsa, he felt unable to repeat such an experience (92). At this distance it has not been possible to sift different views, possibly motivated by misunderstandings or obscure resentments, of a relationship; and in the end, not especially relevant.

There are various and varying images of Arturo Barea in his last years;

and

all

of

them

should

be

able

to

coexist

as

contradictory elements in a polyvalent character. The morose grumpy man, quick to take offence; the intelligent political and literary conversationalist,

holding forth in the Majorca,

at

Buscot House or in cafes in Pennsylvania; the writer, listening intently,

looking

(as a little boy had looked into the Cafe

espanol wi th his nose blurring the glass),

questioning his

nieces; the gregarious, friendly, sentimental man among men (the persona of his BBC talks), who liked a drink in working-class

pubs and got in the front seat of taxis to chat with the driver; the cook who loved the house full of guests; he and lIsa in harmony wri ting together at the big table in the front room under the oil lamps at Middle Lodge; the lonely exile wandering with his dog in the woods.

181

Barea had survived his near-fatal time in Madrid and achieved in his writing what he had doubted was possible. He died suddenly from a heart attack in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 1957, in the presence of rlsa and his sister Concha, whom he was seeing for the first time in 20 years. He was cremated and his ashes scattered at Middle Lodge. Later, Olive Renier arranged for a plaque to him and rlsa in Faringdon churchyard (93).

*****************************

182

NOTES. 1. FR, p.800 2. WAC (Written Archive Centre, BBC). 3. Barea, Arturo, 'Final,' broadcast on Latin American service, BBC, 14/5/45 (WAC).

4. Barea, Arturo, 'Vacaciones,' broadcast (WAC, 30/3/47). 5. Barea, Arturo,

'Senora Smith,'

(WAC, 18/3/46).

6. Barea,

Arturo, 'Final,' (WAC, 14/5/45). See also 'Senora Smith' in Appendix 4 for the Bareas' months in Hertfordshire. 7. Barea, lIsa. Letter to the BBC, 25/7/39. (WAC) 8. Barea, Arturo. Letter, 14/7/40. (WAC)

9. Weeden, Margaret, 'The Arturo Barea Story,' En Australia y Nueva Zelanda, October 1991, published by the Spanish Embassy, Canberra, Australia. Margaret Weeden's view of lIsa and Arturo's relationship during this period is supported by the insight of Gerald Brenan, who met them a little later: "lIsa, calm and mature, the perfect wife and mother figure, had kept him going". (Brenan, Gerald, 'An Honest Man,' The New York Review of Books, 6/3/75. 10. Margaret Rink (later Weeden) was a colleague of lIsa Barea's at the BBC Monitoring Service. 11. The atmosphere of the BBC Monitoring Service,

including comments on Arturo Barea, can be found in Rubinstein and Renier, Assigned to listen, (BBC 1986). 12. Weeden, Margaret, 'The Arturo Barea Story,' art. cit. 13. Ibid.

14. Interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90. 15. For more on lIsa's parents, see Appendix 3. For further information on Fladbury, see Renier, Olive, Before the Bonfire (London 1984), pp.100-101, e.g.: "Wi th another colleague, Margaret Rink, they [Arturo & lIse] found a ramshackle house in Fladbury, a village near Woodnorton. lIse's elderly parents (released from internment) were there, too, and other people came and went -- Spanish, Austrian, English. "Come to supper," they said to us ... and we could expect to get a Spanish omelette of giant proportions, or fried egg~s, done in the Spanish way, or paella, or one of Arturo's speclal roasts (so different from English roast meats), followed on special occasions by profiterolles made by lIse's moth~r, and washed down with beer or wine according to the state of flnances and supplies. Accompanied, too, by a torrent of conversation in four languages. Arturo spoke French and English equally badly and lapsed into Spanish when pressed. "Leche", he would yell ... "

183

16. Lynam, Joan. Letter 29/6/40 (WAC). 17. stuckey, Peter. Letter 12/7/40 (WAC). 18. Weeden, Margaret. Letter to me, 1/11/92. 19. Barea, Arturo. Letter 23/5/41 (WAC). 20. Barea, Arturo. Letter 20/12/40 (WAC).

21. Interview with Leonor Rodriguez Barea, Madrid 23/6/90. 22. Barea, Ar: turo , The: Broken Root,. Page 31 suggests something of Barea's mlxed feellngs of angulsh and guilt about those he

left behind in Spain. 23. The Broken Root, p.56. 24. Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell (born 1866) was British consul at Malaga at the outbreak of the Civil War. He attempted unsuccessfully to save Arthur Koestler from arrest, a story told in My house at Malaga. He was a strong supporter of the Spanish Republic. In his youth, he had not been so liberal and had ~arrelled with H.G.Wells, a friend from medical school, over the latter's support for Oscar Wilde. 25. Fyvel, Tosco in: Barea A., Struggle for the Spanish Soul, p.5. 26. FR, pp.742, 743, 747 inter al 27. Bates, Ralph,

'Arturo Barea,' The Nation, July 15, 1947.

28. Barea, Arturo. Letter, 21/1/55 (WAC). 29. Lynam, Joan. Letter, 29/6/49 (WAC). 30. Barea, lIsa. Letter, 25/7/39 (WAC). See Note 7 above. 31. Swaffer, 3/6/41, p.2.

Hannen,

'Foreign Office Mystery,' Daily Herald,

32. Mansell, Gerald, Let truth be told, 167.

(London 1982), pp.166-

33. Ibid. p.167. 34. Lord Templewood (formerly Sir Samuel Hoare) was part of the

large tendency within the Conservative Party who had been 1930s appeasers of Nazism consequently in favour of 'nonintervention' in the s~anish Civil War and of a 'separa~e peace' with Germany against the Soviet Union. It is very posslble that Templewood was working in Madrid to this latter end. Altho~gh appeasement of Hitler had ended, the same attitudes and POllCY persisted towards Franco. Hoare, Sir Samuel, Ambassador on special mission, (London 1959).

184

35. Mansell, Gerald, op.cit., p.168. Mansell says that the BBC official who actually said the immortal words "We do not employ reds" was H.Duckworth Barker. 36. 'Los seis elefantes blancos,' broadcast 28.10.40 (WAC). 37. Weeden, Margaret, 'The Arturo Barea Story,' art. cit . . 38. Rubinstein and Renier, op.cit .. 39. Of Barea' s c.

800 radio scripts, about 80 (all from the period 1941 to 1947) have survived in the WAC at Caversham. See Appendix 4 for an example of one of them. 40. Lyon Young, H., internal BBC memo, 26/4/46 (WAC). 41. Letter to me from Margaret Weeden, 29/10/92. 42. Letter from J.Camacho to W.Stirling, 10/10/44 (WAC). 43. Letter from rlsa Barea to J.B.Clark, 1/1/58 (WAC).

44. Letter from Arturo Barea to J.B. Clark, Director of External Broadcasting, BBC, 21/5/55, in reply to a letter of congratulation on having done 750 talks (WAC). 45. Letter from C.V. Salmon, 2/8/40 (WAC). 46. Letter from P.H. Newby, 26/6/53 (WAC).

47. 'The Scissors' was published in Horizon in 1941 and appeared as 'Las tijeras' in El centro de la pista. 48. Barea, Arturo, 'Gabriela Mistral,' broadcast 21/8/44 (WAC). 49. Barea, Arturo. Letter, 4/10/43 (WAC). 50. Brenan, Gerald, 'An Honest Man,' art.cit., p.4. 51. The opening chapters of La raiz rota provide background to the Maj orca. 52. Letter to me from Maruja Wallich, February 1995. The view of Barea's youngest niece is that Barea never adjusted to life in England and that rlsa made his life a misery in later years and strangled his literary talent. 53. Letter to me from Joan Gili, 6/3/90.

54. Note Barea's essay 'Ortega and Madariaga' and my comments in Chapter 8. 55. This social patriotism comes out in several broad~asts, for example 10/11/40, 13/5/45, 3/6/45 inter al. See Appendlx 4, too.

56. Barea, Arturo, 'The indivisibility of Freedom,' in Freedom for Spain (Socialist Vanguard, London 1945), p.12.

185

57. Ibid. p.12. 58. Ibid. p. 13. 59. Ibid. P .14. 60. Barea, Arturo, SPAIN in the publications, London 1945), p.15.

post-war

world,

(Fabian

61. Barea, Arturo, The Broken Root, p.29. 62. Ibid. p.30. 63. Interview wi th Gladys Langham, Margaret and Bill Carter, 14/11/89. 64. Ibid. 65. Letter to me from Olive Renier, 6/8/92. 66. Ibid. 67. Interview wi th Gladys Langham, Margaret and Bill Carter, (14/11/89) . 68. Ibid. 69. Letter to me from Roland Gant, 14/6/90. 70. "Fortunately, he had not lost his old love for books, and the inexhaustible English literature became his refuge and his best teacher of the language. Even if he could never get rid of his accent or pronounce some of the more abstruse sounds, he had no difficulty in talking with people after the first couple of years." The Broken Root, p. 28. 71. Brenan and Weeden, arts. ci ts .. 72. Letter from Roland Gant, Weidenfeld, 24/9/90.

14/6/90;

interview with Lord

73. Interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90. 74. Interview wi th Gladys Langham, Margaret and Bill Carter, 14/11/89; and with Olive Renier, 6/7/92. 75. Letter from the Duque de Primo de Rivera, Spanish Ambassador in London, 6/6/56. (4850-3, Archive of the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid). 76. Press statement by Penn. State University, (University Archives) .

February 1952

77. Ibid. 78. Letter to me from Professor Gerald Moser,

Penn. State Archives.

186

12/10/90; and

79. Opoczenski, Ginger, 'Americans ' Activity Astonishes spaniard,' The Daily Collegian, Penn. State, 28/2/52. 80. Ibid. 81. I have used two sources for this tour: the various letters and press cuttings in the WAC of the BBC; and a file containing correspondence from and to the Spanish Embassies in the countries he visited, as well as some press cuttings, in the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores archive in Madrid. 82. Letter from unnamed official of the British Embassy, Buenos Aires, 15/5/56 (WAC). 83. Sarcastic hostile leaflets were printed publicising lectures by 'Mister Arthur Barea ("Beria")'. An article was wri tten on the same theme ("El ex no combatiente, ex madrileno y ex espanol ... " etc. etc. ) in the Nuevo Correo, Buenos Aires, 28/4/56. (R5048-11, Archive of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Madrid). 84. Article in El Pais, Montevideo, 28/5/56, by General Larre Borges. 85. Letter from Spanish Ambassador in Chile, 22/5/56. 86. C6rdoba tape. 87. Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, 'Arturo Barea, una voz,' transcript of a radio broadcast, 29.12.57, in possession of Margaret Weeden. 88. Letter to me from Joan Gili, 6/3/90. 89. Letter to me from Olive Renier, 6/8/92. 90. This is the opinion of Maruj a Wallich (Letter, 1995) and Bill Carter (Interview, 14/11/89). 91. Letter to me from Professor Ian Michael, 10/1/90. 92. Letter to me from Maruja Wallich, February 1995. 93. Letter to me from Olive Renier, 6/8/92. ---------------------

187

February

-CHAPTER 8

CRITICISM AND STORIES. This chapter discusses Barea's literary criticism and the short stories he wrote during his time in England. Although most of this work is completely unknown,

it is not for that reason

second-rate. Some is: there are both stories and essays of little value or interest, except for the vicarious light cast on Barea and his other work. In this category falls the book Unamuno, for instance. But many of the essays and some of the stories are among his best work: indeed Lorca and such stories as Las tijeras and El centro de la pista were written within his great creative period of 1937 - 1944. But he wrote well later too, when his imaginative powers were in decline, especially the introduction to The Hi ve

(1952);

stories like Madrid entre ayer y hoy or

Fisica aplicada, both of which date from 1948; or two discussed in more detail below, Aqua bajo el puente (1947) and La lecci6n (1957). Unlike La raiz rota,

these later stories were mostly

throwbacks to his infancy and so recover much of the mood and intensity of Barea's best book, La forja.

LITERARY CRITICISM.

Barea was a good critic, mainly because he was interested in who reads books. Unlike most critics who pass through University Philology or Li tera ture Facul ties,

Barea did not take it for

granted that people read books. As such, a continuous, vi tal thread through his criticism is the consideration of how people 188

come to read books,

why and what for,

a thread given added

tautness, no doubt, because his own books were unread by his chosen public.

Barea's criticism was not hack or contract work he did for a living (though some was indeed commissioned), but arose directly from his own needs and interests. As such, his articles tend to be well-worked and thought out,

somewhat more durable than

novelists' normal literary journalism. Chapter 3 discussed how his coming to terms with what realism was in other writers, such as Baroja and Hemingway, helped his own artistic attitudes and practice mature. The crucial struggle through which he passed in Paris during 1938 was absolutely vital for his development as a writer. All his subsequent cri tical wri ting was therefore solidly based on his own view of what writing should be, stemming from that 1938 crisis. To put it another looked at

other writings

through

way~

the

his critical writing lens

of what he had

discovered about his own literary needs and style. His great gift of detachment came into play here too: i.e. he did not fall into the subjectivist trap of just appreciating those who wrote like him. But his touchstone was his own particular sort of social realism, whether coming from the American tradition through Dos Passos and Hemingway or the Spanish through Baroja and Sender.

Thus,

Barea's

first

article,

on Hemingway

(see Chapter 3),

enabled him to define the sort of realism he wished to write and had already written (La forja) at that time (1): one which broke with surface description and went "below the surface of things" (2) •

189

His second critical article was a long syrnpa thetic and perceptive review of Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth (3). Within the review , he accurately pinpointed a defect in Brenan's great achievement: a certain overplaying of the role of the anarchists and lack of understanding of the importance of the UGT in the development of working-class and peasant organisation in Spain outside Catalonia and

Andalucia,

especially

In

Madrid.

His

argument

here

illustrates another general strand in Barea' s Ii terary cri ticism: he brought to bear his own political experience. This was true not only of the essays more partial to political comment such as the one on Brenan, but was also a constant theme in his literary articles and books.

It is, of course, ironic that someone so hostile to intellectuals as Barea should have become a literary critic at all. This is merely to confirm that he was anti-elitist and anti-ivory tower rather than anti-intellectual. As mentioned before, he reacted strongly and against privilege,

in literature as in society:

whether it was the Generation of '27's interest in 'high art' or the pro-Stalin social realists who promoted the 1937 Valencia Writers' Congress. (Indeed some of the protagonists of these two movements were the same, such as Alberti or Bergamin) .

Barea's evolution

from poacher to

game-keeper shows how he

himself changed: for one could hardly call Cyril Connolly and Horizon

any less

elitist or

"ivory-tower"

than the Spanish

contemporaries he had earlier spurned. But Connolly was both broad enough in his editorial policy to welcome socialist rough diamonds like Barea and perceptive enough to invite Barea, by

190

1941 winning a name for himself, to contribute.

Barea never set himself up as a critic, writing about all and sundry. His articles, essays and books are spin-offs from his other work, always reflecting his interests. As is to be expected with him, his critical writing is almost wholly about Spain or Spanish writers, except for a few South Americans (4). In fact, Barea's greatest literary achievement apart from the trilogy was in this field of criticism: the book Lorca the poet and his people.

SPANI SH NOVELS.

In a number of articles, Barea commented on the Spanish novel as it was evolving within Spain under Franco. He noted the early development of the regime's desire to clean its fascist face: "The days when Falangists applauded MillAn Astray's shout: 'Down with the intelligentsia' are long past". (5) In New writing in Franco Spain, Barea explained the censorship rules (6). A book which had been approved by the censors before pUblication could still be censored AFTER publication, so forcing its withdrawal from market. This second censorship was especially damaging, as it kept publishers in continual doubt and of lost them money.

cou~se

The consequent conservatism and caution of

publishers during the 1940s meant that even if interesting novels were being written, they were unlikely to be published.

Barea was not only a commentator. He attempted to intervene in policy. In a 1947 letter, he attacked a broadcast on the Third 191

Programme by Walter Starkie: "I claim that the otherwise interesting talk broadcast by prof. Starkie suffers from limiting its scope because of underlying political considerations." (7) Barea based his argument on Starkie's omission of the influence of Antonio Machado and Valle-Inclan on post-war Spain, because "they do not happen to be personae gratae"

(8) and his silence

on Sender. Starkie "failed to give any picture of the type of writing

inside

Spain"

(9).

Barea's

letter

shows

his

main

interest: what writers tell us about their society.

Barea was himself particularly enthusiastic about two books which did get published and have remained famous

to this day:

La

familia de Pascual Duarte (1943) by Camilo Jose Cela (like Barea, an ex-censor) and Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945). This latter is, for Barea, a "depressing and revolting" autobiographical novel about post-war

Barcelona,

full

of

descriptions

of

mad

and

hysterical people (10). "The staggering thing about the book, apart from its populari ty, is the cool acceptance of this sort of Ii fe as normal." ( 11 ) Barea believed that

a

totally non-political novel like Nada

expressed the misery of post-war Spain. "She [Laforet] arrived in the ci ty of the victors, and wrote down what she saw: the blurred picture of violence turned inwards." (12) Barea finds

a

kinship between this

bl urred picture and the

"heaped-up horrors" of Cela' s first novel (13). The terrible tale of

the

impoverished

and

brutish

Pascual

Duarte

is

in

the

tradition of the Spanish satirists who described corruption at all levels of society whilst affirming, to cover themselves, that the book was meant as a deterrent. This "slashing social satire"

192

describes, for Barea, "a deadly, impossible world in which the oppression became tangible and material." (14)

It is the same nightmare atmosphere that will be found in the Madrid of La raiz rota. And there is little doubt that Barea is right, not only in his literary judgment in raising these two books above their contemporaries, but also in that, despite the censorship, they represented a truthful picture of a defeated country or one which had suffered "a deceptive victory, without faith and the

fresh

air of discussion"

(15).

Barea showed

considerable maturity and judgment in his moderate evaluation of what was being wri tten

in Spain,

avoiding the pi tfalls of

dismissing everything wri tten inside the country or of evaluating what he read solely by political criteria. He saw that literature even under mass poverty and repression could tell the truth about the state of society; and as such placed himself solidly in the line of social literary criticism, theorised so brilliantly by Lukacs

(16).

For

Barea

a

book's

literary

quality was

not

separated or abstracted from what it told you about a particular society. But nevertheless he showed disappointment with post-war literature from within Spain. He did not have time to live to see the magnificent rebirth of the novel in the 1960s and '70s. But he was posthumously proved right in his hope that the" ... herida espiri tual [de la guerra] se hara arte creador." (1 7)

Cela is praised in all of Barea's literary essays as "the only important

novelist

so

far

produced

by

the

post-Civil

War

generation" (18). He was able to wri te the introduction to Cela' s most famous novel La colmena, published in English translation

193

in 1953 as The Hive, where Barea once again insists on Cela's place in the Spanish novelistic tradition, because of his grim realism, the picaresque pastiche and "the note of hunger" and fear which runs down the centuries through Spanish literature to Cela (19).

Barea quotes Cela as saying that novels in Spain today could only be written in the "slice-of-life" style of La colmena. Barea notes that this lS a crude sort of realism, which clashes with his own view of a more psychological realism. But, he suggests, no other way of writing is feasible in present Spain: " ... [A]ny modern Spanish psychological novel would be lopsided unless it included the harsh domination of hunger, misery and unsafety in their humdrum forms." (20) Cela's early books, for Barea, were masterpieces of bitterness and a protest against the conditions of life. Barea' s way of evaluating them was to measure his response to their power: to let himself feel the truth of their descriptions. The degradation of Pascual Duarte is perhaps no greater than that of Viance ln Sender's Iman (1930), only 12 years before. But Cela's books of "loss of human dignity" showed that nothing had changed for the better and gave Barea hope that great truthful literature (and thus hope) could be produced even in the darkest years of the dictatorship (21).

Barea also wrote

a

long essay on the

evolution of Spanish

literature from the 1920s through to 1953 (22). Barea's approach is exceptional among literary critics. He focuses on illiteracy and hunger.

' h ow, He d lscusses

l'n the late

'20s,

cheap mass

editions started to be available and sensationalist sex and

194

violence novels began to be devoured by a newly Ii terate workingclass. But also popular was "rebellion in any shape or form" (23): German and Russian novels of revolt poured out in bad translations. These translations undoubtedly were a large part of Barea's own reading matter as well as the mass experience of a generation

hungry

for

books.

He

connects

this

new mass

literature to the marginalisation of the literary figures famous among the elite: Baroja, Azorin and Benavente, who by the late '20s had no literary or cultural impact at all on the masses. "They were merely famous and successful," Barea comments with an ironic dryness uncommon in him (24).

This article pralses Sender whose "bizarre, harsh" "violent

action"

succeeded

movements of the 30s

(25).

in

describing

the

language of new

workers'

In a separate essay on Sender he

acknowledges his debt to the Aragonese wri ter,

especially in

relation to Iman (see Chapter 5), though tantalisingly he hardly refers to the monumental

Cr6nica del

alba,

so evocative of

Barea's own work in its autobiographical account of a gifted, rebellious child.

His essay on Sender ends with this conclusion: and, so I "His unique place in Spanish literature believe, in the contemporary novel -- [is due to] a fusion of the elements of naturalism, symbolism, and idealistic faith. " (26) Throughout

Sender's

work

there

is

a

bizarre

often

vivid

coexistence of realistic accounts wi th symbolic visions,

the

excess of which makes his worst novels like Epitalamio para la

senora Trinidad hard to swallow. This was the very novel whose English translation Barea' s

essay on Sender prefaces.

195

Barea

praised the

development

in Sender

from 1930s chronicler of

popular movements to what he sees romantically as "a modest hope born from a ruthless recognition of the ugliness and violence in our world" (27). Barea highlights Sender's post-war movement away from realism towards "idealistic faith".

Here is not the place to enter into the applicability of Barea's conunents to Sender's work.

In ci ting them, the purpose is to

support the argument of Chapter 7 that by the late 1940s Barea's thinking had developed away from a socialist belief in the possibility of collective struggle to change the status quo -a belief that infuses the early Sender and the Barea of the trilogy.

Barea's

comment

on

"hope

born

from ... recognition

of ... violence" is reminiscent of the end of Barea's own La raiz rota (see Chapter 9), where among death and despair some frail

hope in human goodness arises. But,

both here in talking of

Sender and on the last page of La raiz rota, Barea's views ring false.

He presents

no

concrete basis

for

this

hope

except

sentimentality and wishful thinking. As he moved away from the socialist movement, his belief in a human future became more abstract. These comments on Sender and his own hollow attempt to express the same in La raiz rota demonstrate the creative and intellectual impasse that Barea had reached by the late 1940s. In this sense it is true to say, along with Marra-L6pez: "[Barea] Vacio ya de su ser al morir era un escritor sin futuro, que intentaba, como un p~incipiante, balbucir palabras excesi vamente ingenuas y manidas." (28) But the reason for his increasing emptiness and recurrence to vague "universal values" lay in his progressive distancing from the impulse of revolt and rebellion which burned in the 1937 196

1944 period, in the trilogy and Lorca. His artistic sterility, shown in the decline from the trilogy to La raiz rota,

was

matched by an intellectual stagnation. He did indeed die as a writer without a future.

LORCA, THE POET AND HIS PEOPLE .

Before reaching this low-point in the late 1940s, Barea wrote the best and longest of his critical essays, Lorca the poet and his people, in which he returned to the immediate Spanish past. He wrote this study for Horizon and reworked it for publication In book form in 1944 (29). He was consciously seeking to explain Lorca to an English-speaking audience: as such the book is an early example of cross-cultural studies,

comparing different

modes of viewing death and sex in Spain and Britain and seeking to integrate

them wi th poli tics.

The

particular moment

of

politicised culture and Barea's position as an exile seeking to explain his own country combined to produce an excellent and intense book.

Ramon J. Sender commented of it: "Barea made a brilliant analysis, disengaging himself from ... wordy virtuosity." (30) Sender's point is true of all Barea' s cri ticism:

direct and

unpretentious. In the fifty years since the publication of Lorca, a massive amount has been written about the poet, but Barea's book stands the test of time: both because it is source material, giving a first-hand reaction to Lorca, virtuosity' . 197

and it avoids

'wordy

Lorca is

source material

in

the

sense

that

it

charts

the

reactions of Lorca's contemporaries to his plays and poetry: "I mysel~ never ,knew Federico Garcia Lorca, though he was of my gen,eratlon. I dld not be~ong, to his set. But I belonged to his publlc, the people, and It lS the people's Lorca whom I know." ( 31 ) ,

In La llama, In a passage probably written after Lorca, Barea referred to

the

impact

of

Lorca' s

poetry on

semi -Ii tera te

milicianos (32). Lorca opens by describing the special place of the poet in the minds of these peasants and workers, who, In taking up arms to defend themselves in 1936, opened their minds to political and cultural life. Thus, Lorca was a part of the task Barea set himself in La forja de un rebelde of charting the life of his generation.

The brief 67-page Lorca has three chapters:

The poet and the

people, The poet and sex and The poet and death. In the first, Barea analyses the Romance de la Guardia Civil Espanola in the form of an explanation to a miliciano of its meaning: "He [the militia-man] would produce a tattered copy of Lorca's Romancero Gi tano, fil thy wi th the grease of the trenches, and say: 'Explain this to me. I can feel what it means and I know it by heart, but I can't explain it. (33) 'II

Barea's argument, in brief, is that Lorca had little interest in politics.

Indeed

his

writings

often

have

an

apparently

conservative message, yet Lorca's impact was not conservative: " ... a great part of his work is 'popular' in the sens~ that it touched his people as though wi th the full charge of thelr own half-conscious feelings ... The emotional forces he relea,sed became part of the shapeless revolutionary movements of Spaln whet~er he intended or not ... his work became a banner to the Spanlsh rna sse s ." ( 3 4 ) Barea explains this conundrum through the concrete exegesis of the Romance

de la

Guardia

Ci vil

Espanola,

showing how the

miliciano felt the romantic tale of the Guardia Civil and the 198

gypsies as the clash between the State and the peasants: "; .. they [the peasants] ~ame.to.hat~ the Civil Guard with that b1tter personal hatred Wh1Ch 1t 1S d1fficult to feel for an impersonal system." (35) To illustrate how Lorca, without political comment or deliberate political intent, touched the emotions of workers and peasants, Barea looks at several other poems through the prism of their impact on semi-literate people he met during the Civil War.

Barea's second chapter The poet and sex comments on the plays,

Bodas de Sangre and Yerma. "Lorca ... fel t the emotions at the root of the Spanish sexual code so deeply that in his art he magnified them until tradi tional values came alive wi th disquieting significance." (36)

Barea considers that the plays' productions overseas had failed because

foreign

spectators

could

only

understand

them

intellectually and 'not through the swift, piercing associations and sensations ... produced in a Spanish public' (37). This chapter of analysis of the tradi tional Spanish sexual code, based on 'masculine honour and [female] virginity,' suggests that Lorca's plays are a reductio ad absurdum of Spanish sexual repression (38) •

"I do not mean to convey that Spaniards are like this or that their sexual relations in everyday life conform to this pattern. But this is how the common Spaniard sees himself, and how he feels he is or ought to be. And here lies Lorca's i~ense p?w~r: he makes those obscure sediments of popular Span1sh tradltlon visible with such an emotional impact that he clarifies them. It may be -- perhaps -- a step towards clearing them away." (39) After reading La forja de un rebelde, one cannot read such a passage as the above without thinking of Barea's own personal traj ectory (40).

The third chapter examines Lorca' s treatment of death. Barea 199

argues that in Spanish culture there is a different attitude to death than in England: "[In England] ... everyday life is protected by a taboo on the ~ention of de~th ... Per~etual consciousness of death gives spanlar~s a deep, lnter~st ln the manner of their death. They feel, llke Lorca s gypsles, that they want to die in dignity." (41) Barea maintains that Lorca had to struggle against his fear of annihilation, exacerbated by his inability to accept the easy message of an after-life. "Lorca did not even try to mitigate the fear and terror of individual death by the consolation of religion. In him the spiritual intimacy with death bred an utter clarity of vision -'the ice to his song', said Machado -- which heightened his reaction to the living world but forbade him to blind himself to the finality of individual death." (42) Barea compares Lorca to Unamuno, the subject of Barea's final book.

Both had a

religious

sensibili ty,

1. e.

a desire

for

immortality, without the ability to believe in an after-life: "[Unamuno' s] ... 'tragic sense of life' made him equally incapable of resigning himself to his final death as an individual and of deceiving himself into believing in a survival or resurrection of his individual life." (43) DISTORTION

Barea's line of criticism places him among those who were accused of using the dead poet for political or partisan ends. Martinez Nadal had written from exile as early as 1939: "No less to be censured is the tendentiousness of certain English circles, who seek to make of Lorca a popular poet in ~he class sense, instead of, as he is, the poet of the Spar: 1sh people in the racial sense. No protest can be too strong agalnst this u~e of Lorca' s name for purposes of propaganda." (44) Later, an internal critic Yndurain argued that: "[Barea en Lorca] quiere hacer pasar al llorado poeta granadino par un poeta del proletariado en su lucha contra la Opresi6n y la crueldad." (45) 200

In fact Barea's critique is a curious mixture of the racial and class

approach.

When

understanding of

sex

he

is

talking

and death,

he

of 1S

a

special

Spanish

veering towards

the

folkloric "racial" Lorca. But in his description of the impact of Lorca on the poor, Barea offers a "class" interpretation. It is a subtly made one, too, avoiding the pitfall of propagandistic distortion precisely because it bases itself on the impact of the poet on the twice-hungry people, for the first time thinking in the Revolution of 1936. Barea' s concreteness again makes his case and avoids propagandism.

UNAMUNO.

At first hand, it seems unusual that Barea, a Republican exile, a UGT member close to the Communist Party during the first part of the Civil War, should take a positive interest in Unamuno. For at the outbreak of the war, Unamuno declared himself in favour of the mili tary uprising and was stripped by the Republic of his public posi tions. He was at once confirmed as Rector of Salamanca University by the Nationalists. He became a target of hatred in revolutionary Madrid, all the more intense because he was seen as a traitor to the Republic he had fought for throughout his famous exile during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship.

Nevertheless, his famous speech of October 12, 1936, an act of legendary courage,

again al tered both the posi tion and the

popular perception of Unamuno. Face to face with Millan Astray

201

(a man who, in general, and very specifically for Barea -- see Chapter 5 --, incarnated reaction), Unamuno rose to attack the General personally and the military rebellion in general (46). He was stripped of his Rectorate by the Nationalists. It was allegoric of Unamuno's independence of mind and refusal to go with the flow that in three months he should be sacked by both sides. And he died in melancholy despair just 80 days later.

Despite Unamuno' s contradictoriness (ambivalence is not the word, for Unamuno never doubted, but flung himself whole-heartedly at any position he adopted), he became influential after the war among Spanish exiles. There were several reasons: his own exile, the precursor of their own; his very independence, which many of the exiles (Barea included) felt on reflection they themselves had not maintained among the Communists; his identification with the quest to investigate the nature of Spain, given even greater impulse after the Civil War than 40 years previously after the defeat in Cuba and the Philippines.

Nevertheless, Barea's book (little more than an extended essay, 51 pages

in the English version and 69 in the Spanish)

lS

uninspired. The TLS reviewer commented that it gave an exact idea of Unamuno's writings but "rather a frigid picture" of the man: "He [Barea] obviously sympathises with him [Unamuno] much less than with Garcia Lorca ... We are not told of the powerful swing of the master's prose nor of the marvellous string of perhaps legendary anecdotes." (47)

~amuno reads like the commission it was: its dryness and lack

of passion make it unattractive and so a failure in its purpose of stimulating university students' 202

interest in Unamuno.

It

reflects

the

drying

up

0

f

Barea' s

imagina tion

and

the

stultification of his political views, rather than any antipathy to his subject. For we have the word of lisa that Unamuno was an impassioned theme of Barea's conversation (48).

Unamuno, like Lorca, is divided into three chapters. The first deals with Unamuno' s background and upbringing and focuses on the 1890s, when Unamuno transcended the conflict in his mind between Spanish tradition and opening to Europe, by adopting the idea of fighting for a new Spain yet to be born. The second chapter tackles Unamuno' s "tragic sense of life," which Barea defines as essentially the desire for immortali ty in conflict wi th the rational belief it does not exist. The third chapter "The Poet in Unamuno" explains Unamuno' s desire to be a great wri ter and his realisation that his talent as a poet was slight. Barea maintains (and it is hard to disagree, though the TLS reviewer did) that the characters in Unamuno's novels are on the whole shadowy, little but mouthpieces for his ideas.

Barea shared Unamuno's bloody-mindedness and independence. If Unamuno was talking to a monarchist, he would attack the King; to a catholic, attack the Church; to an atheist, praise God. And so

on.

This

independence

of

mind,

combining

with

great

intellectual range and ability, is attractive -- at a distance. Barea concludes that Unamuno's greatness resides in this honest independence and his abili ty to reveal his conflicts "wi th moral Courage and integri ty". He was "a thinker who teaches how to turn conflict, contradiction and despair into a source of strength." (49 )

203

This final sentence of the book returns again to the terrain noted earlier, in connection with Sender and La raiz rota, of hope arising amidst the worst of circumstances. But Barea again signally fails to demonstrate this in the text. His views on Unamuno are commonplace and unobjectionable, but the book is not "source material" in the sense that Lorca is, and fails to show why Unamuno's stature was so great.

As well as Unamuno,

Barea wrote a brief essay on two other

contemporary thinkers, Ortega and Madariaga. It was part of a series

in

the

Chicago

University

Observer

to

explain

the

renaissance of Christian Democracy as a political force in postwar Europe. Barea has no time for Ortega's conservative theories of how Spain could be saved by intellectual eli tes.

He saw

Unamuno's struggle for a new Spain as a much more honest and democratic enterprise. The apparently rational and liberal Ortega based himself on a traditional view of order in society, which bore no relation to modern reali ties such as big industry or mass movements.

He saw Madariaga as

an epigone of Ortega,

trying to apply

Ortega's general views more practically in the political arena. Both denied equality of opportunity for the poor on the basis that there was a natural order of things, a hierarchic principle, more important than class and economics in the structure of society.

Barea

concludes

with

his

usual

reference

to

the

touchstone of his own experience: "My own life -- the memory of my uncle who had ,been a laborer and felt an almost religious reverence for the artlculate knowledge inaccessible to him, and the memory of unlettered peasants and olive field workers who learned how to read and 204

write in our trenches -- makes me believe that Madariaga' s passive people is a fiction, a fragment of his hierarchical beliefs." (50)

STORIES.

During his stories,

time

in England,

Barea wrote a number of short

from Mister One, which dates from April 1939 and is

discussed in Chapter 2, to La leccion, written in Autumn 1957. 14 of the best of these were collected by lIsa Barea in El centro de la pista, published in Madrid three years after Barea' s death (51) •

These

stories

have

been

barely

mentioned

by

critics:

not

surprisingly, as they were published at a time (1960) when the impact of Barea's trilogy had waned, and within Spain

where

he was unknown except to a few hundred readers of works published abroad. They were not re-issued at the time of the first Spanish publication of the trilogy (1977) and were only republished In a limited edition in a series of Extremaduran writers (1988). It has been treated as a second-rank book by a second-rate writer.

The book should not be so easily dismissed. It is different from his previous volume of stories Valor y miedo, in that its style is much more lyrical and subject-matter more varied. Its main problem, which it shares with Valor y miedo, is that very few of the stories are short stories in the proper sense of the word. Although they are usually longer and fuller than Barea's first book's sketches, they often lack the twist, plot, personality or

ending that creates a satisfying short story. 205

La rifa, for example, describes how a young poor girl uses her mother's money to win a duro in the market lottery. It contains a subtle account of the relationships within a family;

and,

exception which proves the rule, is not autobiographical. Barea tells the story with considerable skill from the points of view of the 7-year old girl, her older sister and her mother. The story as story, however, does not work because Barea does not know how to end it. The ending is sudden and confused. Thus it misses being a story and becomes more a slice-of-life chunk of description, just like the fascinating account of characters from his childhood Madrid entre ayer y hoy.

In general, Barea did not have the particular gift of compression necessary in a short-story writer. He knew how to order material, indeed to express a lot in a very short space (see analyses of parts of La ruta and La llama in Chapters 5 and 6), but in the trilogy his effects are mostly created by contrasting events and contexts developed over many pages.

The stories are of great interest to anyone who has read La forja de un rebelde and wants to delve deeper into Barea' s mental world; and some of them are indeed accomplished. Nine of the 14 could have fitted into La forja de un rebelde, mostly La forja, - a fact which once again shows the unity of all Barea's work -just as most of the incidents of Valor y miedo would have fitted into La llama. Like Lorca, the stories are footnotes to Barea's novelised autobiography, feeding from the same source of his li fe in Spain and, in most cases, of his childhood (52).

206

El cono and Aqua bajo el puente attack social injustice in the

countryside. The events date (as there is no evidence he ever invented anything substantial) from Barea's time working on an estate in the late 1920s or his months at Noves In 1935/6. El

testamento describes the folly of waiting to inherit wealth; El huerto attacks snobbery in C6rdoba, Madrid entre ayer y hoy,

where Barea had family;

the social changes accompanying the

introduction of running water in the first years of the century; Fisica aplicada, like the sinister Las tijeras, is about children

playing.

LA LECCI6N

For anyone with some knowledge of Barea's trajectory, the 7-page La lecci6n is a story imbued with his longing for the past, a longing expressed in its language. In the following extract, for example, phrases like "la Abuela Grande," "como la llamabamos" and "sus buenos" contribute to an atmosphere of tender memory: " ... la Abuela Grande, como la llamabamos ... media sus buenos dos metros y tal vez algun centimetro de regalo." (53) The longing is also expressed in the almost obsessive description of detail, such as " ... mi hermana, con sus trenzas tiesas atadas con cinti tas roj as ... " and the subsequent description of the railway

station

(54).

The

cinematic

intensity

of

Barea's

externally seen, naturalist descriptions not only creates (as is to be expected) a vivid costumbrista picture of old Madrid, but also a subjective world of emotive memory. As in La forja, the realist Barea at times seems closer to Proust than Baroja. The reason lies in this excess of vision, this extreme detail, which 207

gives a subjective, emotional tinge to the descriptions.

The protagonist of La leccion is Barea's own grandmother (55). Barea succeeds in combining a comic and affectionate tone with the intensity of description. The story ends satisfyingly with a twist; and then is beautifully and economically rounded off with

the

author's

own

later

experience,

putting

his

"grandmother's lesson" (the story's English title) into practice. It is a classic lesson of individualism and pride: "'Al que se hace de miel, se 10 coman las moscas. Para andar por la vida hay que no dej arse pisar por nadie. Es la unica forma de que le respetan a uno ... '" (56)

AGUA BAJO EL PUENTE.

An

altogether rougher and harder story is Aqua bajo el puente.

Also autobiographical,

it

lS

an

excellent political

story,

beautifully and subtly written, which in 11 pages succeeds in explaining why the poor peasantry supported the Republic and would fight to defend their gains in the Civil War. Its style is more sober and spare than La 1 ecci on's,

though it does not

abandon the conversational, confiding voice common to several of the stories of El centro de la pista.

The story is set on an early summer's day in 1931 and recalls the circumstances around the killing of a hated cacique, Don Antonio. There are three versions of events: that of the self-satisfied right-wing magistrate with a "boca de hombre debil," of the Civil Guard who does not like the new regime but is prepared to cut his

208

coat to fit, and of the narrator's friend the shoemaker who is revealed to have played a decisive part in the killing. an

appalling

amateur

writer

of

The

magistrate

is

exaggerated

journalism,

a baroque style associated wi th petty provincial

dignitaries and alien to Barea's spare style and directness.

The true reason for Don Antonio's murder is clear

(though a

sharper sexual motive is also implied): "[Don Antonio] ... manipulaba a maravilla las elecciones, los concejos municipales, los guardias civiles y la gente de alta categoria ... En el pueblo no habia ni un solo hombre que no odiara a Don Antonio con toda su alma." (57) The skill of the story is that by gradually setting the scene through

the

different

points

of

Vlew,

Barea

succeeds

In

justifying the murder. This tyrant's death lS justified by the release of the water, whose loss was the main factor which had cast the villagers into debt and dependence on Don Antonio. S~ol

and concrete image mesh, both functioning perfectly at

their own levels: the hopes of the new Republic flow with the water

"hasta

las

dimuni tas

huertas

sedientas"

(58).

Barea

understood the value of water on the dry meseta, as he had shown in La ruta when he described the stubborn fig-tree fed by the spring. And he understood too the role of the all-powerful cacique, as he showed at the start of La llama with another Don Antonio,

Heliodoro

the

usurer

of

Noves.

Politically

artistically the story is a triumph: surely Barea's best.

************************

209

and

NOTES.

1. Barea, Arturo,

'Not Spain, but Hemingway,' Horizon, 1941.

2. Barea, Arturo, 'A Quarter Century of Spanish Writing,' Books abroad (1953). 3. Barea, Arturo, 1943, pp. 203 - 209 .

'The Spanish Labyrinth,' Horizon,

September

4. His only divergences from criticisms of Spanish literature were reviews o,f books about Spain, such as The Spanish Labyrinth, and a few scrlpts for broadcasts on South American writers.

5. Barea, Arturo,

'New writing in Franco Spain,' London Forum,

Winter 1946, p.61. 6. Ibid. pp. 62-63. Barea based himself on Gustavo Gili's Bosquejo de una poli tiea del libro, a book published wi thin Spain (1944), to explain the Spanish censorship.

7. Letter from Arturo Barea to Programme Organiser, BBC Third Programme, 2/2/47 (WAC). 8. Ibid.

9. Ibid. 10. Barea, Arturo, 'New wri ting in Franco Spain,' art. ci t., p. 68.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid. p.69. 13. Ibid. p.70. 14. Ibid. p.71. 15. Ibid. p.71. St udi es in European Reali sm, (London 1972). Lukacs makes a useful distinction between naturalism, which shows the external workings of people, and social realism, which shows the internal and the external, that is both psychology and society, and their interaction. 16. Lukacs, Georg,

17. Barea

Arturo 'Realism in the Modern Spanish Novel,' Focus Two, (194'6), as ~uoted in Yndurain, Francisco, 'Resentimiento espanol,' Arbor, 85, (Madrid, enero de 1953), p. 76. 18. Barea, Arturo, 'A Quarter Century of Spanish Wri ting, , Books abroad, Spring 1953, p.128.

Barea, Arturo, in: Cela, Camilo, Pp.8 & 13. 19.

20. Ibid, p. 8 .

210

The hive,

(London 1953),

21. Ibid. p.16. 22.

Barea,

art. ci t ..

Arturo,

'A Quarter

Century of

Spanish Wri ting, '

23. Ibid. p.119. 24. Ibid. p.120. 25. Ibid. P .126; and Barea, Arturo in: Sender, Ram6n J., The Dark Wedding (London, 1948) p.1S.

26. Barea, A.: In The Dark Wedding, op.cit., pp.14-1S. 27. Ibid. p. 15.

28. Marra-L6pez, Jose, op.cit., p.339. 29. On the 17.11.44 Barea gave Instituto Espanol, London (WAC).

30. Sender, art. ci t.

Ram6n,

'The

a

lecture

on

Lorca

in

the

Spanish Biography of Arturo Barea,'

31. Larca, p.12. 32. FR, p.7S4 33. Larca, p.13. 34. Ibid. p.11 35. Ibid. p.30

36. Ibid. p.30 37. Ibid. p.3S

38. Ibid. p.SO 39. Ibid. p.52 40. For more on Barea's personal sexual history, see Chapter 6. Indirect evidence of Barea' s views is also contained in the discussion on women between Antolin and Eusebio in the second chapter of La raiz rota. 4l. Ibid. p.56

42. Ibid. p. 60 43. Ibid. p.60

44. Martinez Nadal, Rafael, in: F.Garcia Lorca, Poems, ,(Dolphir:,

~ondon 1939),

p.xxvii. On page 55 of Lorca, lntroductory essay by Martinez Nadal.

45. Yndurain, art. cit., p.76. 211

Barea cltes thlS

46. The story of this day has been often retold. The most vivid recent account is contained in Trapiello, Andres, Las armas y las letras, (Barcelona 1994), pp. 42-44. 47. Anon, 'In permanent opposition,' TLS, 5/12/52. 48. Barea, lIsa, Unamuno,

(Buenos Aires 1959), Envio.

49. Unamuno, p.58

50. Barea, Arturo, 'Ortega and Madariaga,' University Observer, Chicago 1948, p.36. 51. In her introduction to El centro de la pista, lIsa Barea implies there are other stories she has not collected, but I have not been able to find any. I suspect too that many of the stories contained in this volume had not found a publisher, for three reasons. First, lIsa Barea states the date of composition for each story, but not the date of publication. Second, the only two stories whose publication she mentions (Las tijeras and La lecci6n) are precisely the only two I have found. Third, I have looked extensively in British journals for his stories and have not been able to find any, except the English versions of the two mentioned above and Brandy, translated from Valor y miedo. I suspect lIsa was not telling the truth when she said the stories had been published previously, in order to facilitate their publication in El centro de la pista. Lucky she did! Otherwise they would be lost. 52. These nine are: El cono (1942), El testamen to (1942), El centro de la pista (1945), El huerto (1945), Aqua bajo el puente (1947), Madrid entre ayer y hoy (1948), Fisica aplicada (1948), La rifa

(1954) and La lecci6n (1957).

53. CP, p. 77 54. Ibid. p. 78

55. She was the same pagan grandmother, Ines, whose intervention had saved Barea as a child from the Jesuits, celebrated at the end of his wri ting life, as she had been at the start in La forja (see Chapter 4) . 56. CP, p.83 57. Ibid. pp. 113 and 117 58. Ibid. p.121 ---- ---------------

212

CHAPTER NINE.

EXILE WITHOUT RESENTMENT. SPANISH EXILES.

Arturo Barea lived the last 18 years of his life in exile. Exile, of course, is a painful state of statelessness. But in Barea's case, paradoxically, his personal uprroting coincided with his greatest success. All his best work was wri tten in exile: he became

a

successful

writer

in

exile

[in Yndurain's

words:

"nuestro unico escri tor nacido a las letras en el destierro" (1)],

even though the process of his conversion from middle-class

businessman, morally adrift, to a committed novelist had begun while he was still in Spain. The first part of this chapter deals with exile,

destierro

(dis-earthing)

in the vivid Castilian

term, and how it affected Barea; the second

examines his novel

on exile, La raiz rota.

Jose Marra-Lopez cites Barea as the outstanding example of the thesis of his book on the Spanish novelists of the 1939 diaspora, a theory worth examining for the light it throws on Barea's work (2). Marra-Lopez states: "Como escritor, Barea, para bien y para mal, ha perm~necido fiel al arraigamiento espanol, hasta el punto de que caSl es el unico escritor emigrado que no se ha apartado en ningun momenta en su trayectoria narrati va del suelo patria." (3) In other words Barea wrote only about Spain. The sole exceptions in his published works are two brief stories: otherwise all he wrote was set on Spanish soil or dealt with Spanish themes (4).

213

Marra-L6pez emigrated in

maintains

that

Spanish

successive waves

political

throughout

exiles,

who

the 19 th and 20th

centuries, suffered to a special extent from enforced absence from Spain, finding great difficulty in integrating into local society.

In

the

1939

exodus,

the

precarious

economic

circumstances of many emigres increased this isolation. Moreover, the historic magnitude of the Civil War and the subsequent length of exile and dampening of hope as Franco's regime consolidated itself after 1945 deepened the exiles' misery.

That the major prose writers of this latest diaspora wrote almost exclusively of Spain was exacerbated by their isolation and misery in foreign countries. The most cursory look at Ayala, Sender, Aub or Barea, or, in other fields, Sanchez Albornoz or Americo Castro, confirms that these writers were obsessed with explaining Spain and its problems. In this they followed the call of their predecessors of the 'Generation of '98,' who had urged Spaniards to examine the reasons for the catastrophic state of the country (5). The Civil War carnage, just 40 years after the farcical war of 1898, acted as an imperious command to any selfrespecting Spanish thinker to carry out this examination.

If then the 1939 exile was unable to write of anything but Spain, a vi tal follow-up question arose: who was their audience? Who were they writing for? Marra-L6pez cites Francisco Ayala, who wrote forlornly in 1948: "GPara quien escribimos nosotros? Para tod?s y para n~die, seria la respuesta. Nuestras palabras van al Vlento: conflemos en que algunas de elIas no se pierdan." (6)

214

The exile, continues Marra-Lopez's thesis, has an 'eterno anorar desesperado' his/her

for

having

Spain, been

expressed

violently

.

In constant awareness

uprooted

and

an

of

obsessive

preoccupation with la patriae However, as time passes, the exile becomes steadily more distant from the reality of his/her own country.

This

process

leads

to

the

creation of

'la Espana

invent ada , by authors whose writing about the Spanish past

lS

exhausted, but who no longer know what the Spanish present

lS

like (7) . Increasingly the exiled wri ter runs the risk of wri ting for no real audience at all.

In the most extreme cases, the exile returns to a beloved and longed-for Spain, but that Spain imagined in exile no longer exists. Fictionally this occurs in Ayala's El regreso and Barea's La raiz rota and the returnee has li ttle option but to leave again,

feeling an exile in his own country

(8). As Barea' s

protagonist Antolin concludes at the end of La raiz rota: "En Londres ... siempre estaba pensando si no me sentiria menos solo entre gente que hablara mi lengua. Esto se acabo. Claro que voy a ser toda mi vida un extranjero en Inglaterra; pero aqui tambien soy un extranjero y esta clase de soledad es peor y me hiere mucho mas, porque me hiere en la propia carne." ( 9)

The case of Arturo Barea seems,

indeed,

to fit Marra-Lopez' s

argument. Barea's exile was in England, a particularly lonely place wi thin this diaspora.

His

li terary production,

almost

wholly produced in exile, is entirely about Spain. His greatest achievements, La forja de un rebelde and Lorca, concern the Spain he knew intimately and then recalls in every yearning detail. His weakest book, La raiz rota, is precisely when Barea imagines the return to Spain he cannot actually make.

215

The titles of his books graphically make a very similar point ~out

his uprooting. Barea tells us that he first thought of

calling La forja, Las raices (10); and of course La raiz rota

lS

that severed root when Franco's victory chopped Antolin and the defeated Republicans out of their native land's contemporary history. The root was an image in Barea's mind at least from when he wrote La ruta, where the fig-tree roots, so hard to break, represent underground resistance to reactionary Spain's imperial quest.

As further evidence in support of Marra-L6pez's argument, we can point to Barea's virtual silence after this last novel (11). The suggestive possibility that he started or planned another novel, but never got anywhere with it, confirms the withering of his inspiration, so fertile just ten years previously (12). Moreover Barea never learned to speak or write well in English (13). He was no Conrad, Nabokov or Koestler, who changed languages through exile and actually wrote their most famous books in English. And certainly he could never be accused of writing a novel nor even a short story about his adopted country!

BAREA: NOT SO TYPICAL AN EXILE.

Closer

examination,

interpretation

does

however, not

suggests

correspond to

that Barea's

Marra-L6pez's story.

At

a

personal level, Barea integrated himself to a high degree into English life, in various ways which affect understanding of his Work. Margaret Weeden, who shared the Bareas' houses during the War years, wrote: 216

"Arturo Barea was on~ of th,?se ,people who are at home in any sort ?f company. He wasn t, a bl t lnterested in famous people, only ln people as human belngs. He was tremendously popular in all the country pubs that w~r~ the 'local' in whatever part of England he happened to be llvlng. He would drink beer and play darts with the farm labourers, tease the landlord and somehow even when supplies were at their lowest, always ma~age to wangl~ from that gentleman a generous supply of beer wine and cigarettes." (14) , Barea rapidly found his feet in England. The Puckeridge pub had been the basis for his first British article in 1939 (15). Pubs were the places he found most congenial throughout his years in England: perhaps in them he found some echo of Serafin's bar, which he had frequented in his youth and had become his refuge at crucial times of stress during the Civil War. Pubs,

too,

supplied the basic material of anecdotes and personalities for his BBC broadcasts (see Chapter 7) .

A second pointer to Barea's involvement in English life is his

lack relationships wi th other Spanish exiles. In the liberal exile of the 1830s, large numbers of Spanish intellectuals had grouped together in London.

But after 1939, most Republican

exiles went to Central and South America, France and the Soviet Union and only a scattering to other places. Few reached Bri tain, partly because Britain was much harder to get into than it had been, especially for left-wing exiles. The Bareas were lucky to have found a sponsor (16). Exact figures do not exist, but it would seem that out of seven to eight hundred thousand exiles, who had left Spain by April 1939, only a small proportion (almost certainly less than ten thousand) found refuge in Britain (17).

Among these there were relatively few artistic or poli tical figures: the 1939 exile was a mass exodus (18). Barea describes

217

briefly this world as the background to Antolin's experiences In

La raiz rota (19). In the Majorca restaurant, Barea met other spaniards and discussed news from home (see Chapter 7), which he did with his

customary

gregariousness

but wi thout

becoming

politically involved (20). In Madrid he had liked to chew over political ideas in bars, but detested the intrigue of committee and party politics. essence

of

exile

Impotent intrigue is of course the very politics,

where

negative

features

are

exacerbated by the exiles' impotence (21).

His adopting Bri tish nationali ty,

his going to live In the

country and his enjoyment of country life are other pointers to his contentment in England. Most of all, his explicit praise of England throughout his radio broadcasts go a lot further than any merely formal courtesies (see Chapter 8).

CULTURAL AND LITERARY CIRCLES.

Nor did Barea involve himself in exiles' cultural life. Although he visited and spoke at Oxford University and lived briefly in Oxford, he shunned the academic world

(22).

Barea may have met

Luis Cernuda, who worked at Cambridge during the 1940s, but there is no record of any friendship or discussions between them

(23).

There was little Spanish cultural life in which he could become involved; and what there was, he avoided.

Barea's political apartness was in fact no different from his pre-Civil War attitudes: it had only been during that war that he had briefly moved to the centre of the poli tical stage.

218

Similarly, his aloofness from cultural circles was consistent with the previous pattern of his life. In this respect England represented not a rupture in Barea's attitudes, but continuity.

But whereas exile might be expected to bring an ossifying of previous attitudes, especially in a man over 40 when he left his country, the reverse was true for Barea. After the initial shock of his first year, Barea relaxed in Bri tain and developed a more, rather than less, positive view to cultural reviews and figures. Chapter 7 noted his

contact wi th

lIsa's

colleagues at the

Moni toring Service, his connections wi th Brenan and Connolly, his meeting John Betjeman

(24).

He knew too some of the people

involved in the 'Searchlight' series. All this was new to Barea: unlike other exiled writers,

he had not experienced life in

cui tural circles before leaving Spain and so had nothing to miss, no sense of loss in this respect.

In beginning to write essays of literary criticism, Barea showed that his earlier childish antipathies

to other wri ters and

critics had softened. Previously, he had rejected cultural and literary circles, partly on account of their rejection of him when in 1913 he had attempted to enter Madrid's literary world (25).

Barea may well

have

then

imagined

snubs

which were

unintended.

But even more indicative of his previous approach had been his attitude

to

the

Residencia

de

Estudiantes,

which

in

the

post-World War One period became the base for one of the most brilliant literary and artistic generations of Spain's or any

219

country's history. This was precisely Barea's generation: he was a year older than Garcia Lorca, three years older than BUlluel, fi ve years older than Alberti and Dali. And yet he never met Lorca or any of them (26). It is worth quoting at length what Barea has to say about the Residencia: "Existia entonces [c. 1913] un centro cultural en Madrid la Instituci6n Libre de Ensenanza ... De alli y de su Residenci~ de Estudiantes estaba saliendo una nueva generaci6n de escri tores y de artistas; yo creia que mi manera de pensar estaba de acuerdo con los fines de ambas insti tuciones. Pero cuando intente establecer un contacto, me encontre con ... una especie de aristocracia de la izquierda. Era tan caro ingresar ... como en una de las aristocraticas escuelas de los jesuitas. Si, habia cursos y conferencias gratui tos, pero para seguirlos tenia que abandonar mi trabajo, es decir, mi unico medio de vida. Me convenci que la obra magnifica de Giner de los Rios adolecia del mismo defecto de toda la educaci6n espanola: que sus puertas estaban cerradas para las clases trabajadoras ... No habia camino abierto para mi. Renuncie a escribir." (27)

Unlike so many working-class children in this situation, Barea's desire to write was not totally extinguished. But it took the enormous upheaval of the Civil War, twenty-five years after the period he is writing about in the above extract, to stimulate him to start again.

During the Civil War, Barea recorded his continuing contempt for the maj ori ty of wri ters and intellectuals who passed through Madrid,

including

the

famous

participants

in

the

Writers'

Congress: " ... el Congreso Internacional de Escritores Anti-fascista~, Con sus intelectuales exhibiendose presuntuosos en el escenarlO de Madrid en lucha." (28) But of course no-one, not even a relatively unpolished writer like Barea, can mature as a writer with infantile rejection of all other wri ters. He fel t he had nothing to learn from Benavente And Barea or from the gongoristas of his own generation. 220

preferred Serafin's tavern to Alberti, Malraux or lesser prostalin propagandists of the Writers' Congress; with justice in terms of his own writing and personality, even if not without some inverted snobbery (29).

But there were at least two writers he met and respected during the war:

John

Dos

Passos

and Ernest

Hemingway.

Both were

recorders of grim contemporary reality in prose, working outside the direct influence of Stalinist social realism. The 'cinematic' effect that is evident in a number of sketches of Valor y miedo and in La forj a owes something to Dos Passos' techniques. Perhaps too the confidence to try and chronicle his age, mixing private and public events, owed a debt to Dos Passos, even though the latter's collage way of doing this was very different (30).

Hemingway was more of a benchmark for Barea. As discussed in Chapter 3, Barea went through a process of change and struggle in 1938 to move from the surface realism of Valor y miedo to the more sophisticated psychological realism of La forja. Barea's 1941 essay on Hemingway implicitly summarises that process within a critique of Hemingway's romanticisation of Spain (31). But there is no doubt that Valor y miedo owes something to Hemingway in its baldness and directness of style. More than anything, however, friendship and discussion with such good writers gave Barea the confidence to start.

So Barea was not averse to learning from wri ters. But he went his own way and was unawed by reputations. It should be no surprise that in Britain he was no more interested in the literary world

221

than previously, although, being now himself a writer, he met other writers. There was continuity in his attitudes. And where he changed, his attitudes were softened, rather than hardened as might normally be expected, by exile.

PANIC OR CLARITY?

Arturo Barea ends Lorca by discussing what he saw as Lorca' s panic, reflected in El poeta en Nueva York, pages which inspire reflection on Barea's own position as an exile. "In 1930, this poet from Granada, mind alive with the silvery green of washed little houses ... -- finds himself York, on a volcanic floor of asphal t."

-- the landscape of his olive fields and whi tein a street canyon of New (32)

Barea describes the poet's 'angry frustration' at being cut off from his roots and the hatred that exploded within him. Barea asks why Lorca responded thus and suggests: "Lorca, like so many others, refused to become part of a world other than his own, and thus that other world seemed to him only a living death ... [he] was now suddenly thrown back on his own weakness and loneliness ... and his vision was no longer clear." (33) This response is reminiscent of Barea' s own first feelings on his exile during 1938 and 1939. He stated later: "Yo llegue a Inglaterra ... uno mas entre los mill~res huidos de las delicias de un Nuevo Orden que se anunclaba Europa con explosiones de bombas, con alambradas de camI;0s concentraci6n ... dolorido de mi propia tragedia ... desposeldo todo can la vida truncada y sin una perspectiva futura, ni patria, ni de hogar, ni de trabaj 0." (34)

de en de de de

But unlike Lorca's panic in New York on losing touch with his familiar world, Barea's artistic vision was clarified and fed by exile. Barea' s most productive years coincided wi th the first years of his exile. Lorca, La forja de un rebelde, Struggle for

222

the spanish Soul, indeed all his writing, show that Barea' s heart

and mind were fixed on Spain. But this did not stop him finding literary nourishment and maturity in England. His dispassionate objectivity and ruthless clarity, which were the necessary tools for his investigation of his own past and the causes of the war, were aided by his exile. He was able to look from a distance, without panic. His own past,

Spain itself, he could perceive

better from England.

He had not been one of the privileged intelligentsia in Spain. And when,

in Madrid and London, he had ready access to that

world, he chose to remain apart. But that should not be taken to mean that Barea stayed aloof from British life: at the cultural level he participated more than he had in Spain and at the popular level integrated himself into aspects of local life.

LA RAiZ ROTA.

Failure. Barea's last novel, La raiz rota, denies any idea that Barea had found full peace of mind in his last years. It is a painful, emotional book, which does indeed fi t Marra-Lopez' s thesis of the exile out of touch with contemporary Spanish reality, writing compulsively about an invented Spain.

La

raiz rota is Barea's only imagined novel, in the sense that

he is writing a story which is not literally true and inventing fictional characters

(35). And it is not a good book. It has

suffered almost universal mauling from critics of both left and

223

right, British, Spanish and South American (36). "El fallo es doble, tecnico e ideo16gico, forma un triste documento" (37) "Una obra panfletaria, rayana en el folletin, increible." (38 )

y en conjunto in~til

por 10

" ... novelista fracasado por dar en escritor panfletario" (39 )

"La descripci6n de una realidad no vivida y, por tanto, montada sobre cuatro t6picos carentes de autentico valor representa ti vo" (40) The negative reactions were fair, but perhaps exaggerated because of disappointed expectation that Barea did not write fIla novela del exiliado" (41). The key failure of La raiz rota lies in that there are not two struggling arguments: it is not dialectical but, rather, monolinear. Barea tilts everything to support his proposal: that it is impossible for his exiled protagonist to return to Spain. It is "casi de tesis" in one cri tic's words

(42). As such, the tension that arises from the struggle within Barea throughout La forja de un rebelde, the dualism of the child caught between poverty and wealth, and of the man torn between honour and corruption or between union struggle and a comfortable job, no longer exists.

There is indeed an anguished conflict

within his protagonist Antolin Moreno: to stay or return. But all the dice are loaded in favour of the return. The situation is prejudged.

This is the central artistic failure of the novel. It represents a political failure too, for profound politics cannot emerge from manichean board-games. But La raiz rota is not all dross. It is a painfully

raw

and

honest

book,

written

with

Barea's

characteristic sincerity. It is of a oneness with all his work, Whether essay, political pamphlet, story, novelised biography or 224

biographised novel, in that the subject is Spain and the state of spain. Whereas La forja de un rebelde examined the causes of the Civil War and Struggle for the Spanish Soul investigated the ideology of the victors, consequences

of

defeat

La raiz rota seeks to examine the and

the

reality of

life

under

the

dictatorship. Its mood is gloomy and static, similar to the chill and misery in Nada, which Barea admired (see Chapter 8). It is not so distant from the stifling, nihilistic mood of La colmena, poolished at much the same time. The image of the beehive In Cela's novel and in Victor Erice' s colmena,

1973)

two decades later,

film

(El

espiri tu de la

to represent a closed and

isolated society, would be appropriate too to Barea' s novel (43). Barea's achievement in creating this remote, closed, oppressed society into which irrupts a man from another world is real and should not be ignored because of other defects.

In three specific ways La raiz rota can be read as a sequel, or rather a melancholy coda, to La forja de un rebelde. Firstly, it seeks to continue the story of Madrid up to 1937 contained in the trilogy wi th a portrai t

of the hunger,

market of Madrid 1949.

Second,

repression and black

Barea maintains

the balance

between the social and psychological, which, as he had theorised throughout the 1940s, made him the kind of realist who was not content just to seek social explanations, but investigated the psychology of his characters. And thirdly, Barea repeats in La

raiz rota his use of a large cast of secondary characters, with which he seeks to illuminate the various classes and tendencies in society.

225

La raiz rota has three principal differences from the trilogy. First, the novel is written not through the eye of the first person narrator, but from a position of authorial omniscience, entering not only into the thoughts and feelings of Antolin, but also into the minds of other characters, especially Antolin' s children Pedro, Juan and Amelia. Second, Barea is not writing about a Madrid he knows. The Madrid of La raiz rota is the Madrid Barea knew plus 10 years of imagined change. For a writer as fresh and descriptive as Barea, this lack of direct knowledge of the 1949 city is damaging. During the writing of the book he talked closely with his nieces Maruja and Leonor, who came to live with him in 1947 (44), but the directly seen vividness of detail so important to Barea's writing in La forja de un rebelde is missing. The third important difference is that the novel is too schematic: many of the characters are only there to represent abstract ideas. This point I will return to later.

Plot.

In two respects, the plot is strong. It is similar to La ruta in that it is naturally framed by the protagonist's arrival in and departure from a foreign country. And it opens clearly, defining the different characters in their backgrounds during the first 5 chapters. Antolin returns to Madrid from exile in London 10 years after the end of the Civil War. He wants to see his wife and three children, whom he had left behind, and to sort out whether to stay with them or return to live with Mary in England. He is moved both by a sense of responsibility and also, more selfishly,

by his loneliness in England. His arrival is the

226

catalyst

for

explosions

in his

family.

His

wife

Luisa has

retreated into bitterness, snobbery and spiritualism; one son, Pedro, is a pimp and black marketeer well in with the Falange; the other, Juan, is a Communist factory worker; and his daughter, Amelia, is under the control of another of Barea's long line of nasty priests, the unctuous Father Santiago (see Chapter 4) .

After the first five chapters of exposition, the plot runs into problems, as Barea's admirer Marra-L6pez denounces: " ... en una serie de "coincidencias" verdaderamente ingenuas desde el punto de vista novelesco -- puro "tempo" decimon6nico a 10 Palacio Valdes ... -- comienzan a aparecer mas personajes concretos de la fabula, unidos unos con otros como una ristra de chorizos ... " (45) In one sense the plot works like clockwork: each coincidence is fully justified.

Conchita

knows Eusebio because she is his

masseuse; Caro knows Pedro because they both visi t

the same

brothel; Conchita knows Luisa because she is Americo's medium etc .. But, whereas one coincidence is realistic enough and two acceptable,

such a lengthy succession of them (una ristra de

chorizos) undermines any semblance of overall reality.

Antolin sees his family in action, as Pedro and Amalia denounce Don Americo the spiritualist and Juan, who are both killed, to the police and church, respectively. Disgusted, he feels relieved of any responsibility and, after managing to fix up Amelia in a convent and Luisa wi th Conchi ta 's mother

(another improbable

coincidence), he decides to return to England. But to escape the police and get Lucia, his dead son's girl-friend, out of the country, he has to dirty his hands and use the services of the

estraperlista Colonel Caro. 227

Exile and Nostalgia.

The theme of exile, discussed in the first part of this chapter, pervades the novel. From the first page, when Antolin is dozing in the train drawing in to Madrid and "memories of innumerable trips to the sierra rushed to his mind," (46) Barea is in the terrain of nostalgia for the past. Antolin then misunderstands the reason for the four young men jumping from the moving train. He thinks they are young bull-fighters without a ticket, whereas in fact they are black marketeers. From general dreamy nostalgia for a lost past, Barea has shifted the reader rapidly into a rough present: Antolin no longer understands what is going on in his own country. He is an exile in his own land. As Antolin leaves the train, he bumps into someone on the platform and says "Sorry" in English. Embarrassed, sticking out with his clothes and manners as a foreigner,

he moves away down the platform,

"wishing to disappear among the people" (47). But he will not be able to. He is decisively different, as his first meeting -- with his old friend Eusebio -- rapidly confirms.

These strong opening pages of La raiz rota set the scene with Barea's customary care. The basic thematic question of the novel is clearly expounded: whether Antolin will stay or go, whether he will "disappear among the people" or remain an exile. This failed novel confirms once more that Barea is a much more careful writer in his composition, plotting and juxtaposition of themes than he has usually been given credit for.

228

RootS.

Just as Barea had in La ruta, here too he uses imagery of roots (mentioned at least 15 times in the novel) to underpin his theme. Antolin -- and Barea -- are searching for "las raices que le habia arrancado la guerra" (48). Pedro, his "honest bastard" of a son, has his roots covered in slime (49). As the novel moves towards its climax, Antolin tries to work out his position in the following scene with his confidante and landlady Dona Felisa: "Most people I've met in Madrid ... are just as much uprooted as I am, though they didn't go into exile. In fact they're rootless. What is it that has gone so wrong? .. Of course, I know everybody in this country's poisoned by the corruption and the violence of the last ten years." (50) Barea's argument here contradicts his previous lmage of roots being severed by exile and the war, for the quote implies that there

is

something more

than

Francoism which has

uprooted

everybody and echoes the words of his frontispiece to the novel: "In telling a story about Spaniards living in Madrid in 1949, I have tried to give shape to human problems which are universal and by no means confined to a particular country." (51) In so extending the idea to include all humanity, he falls into a kind of superficial existentialism, i.e. that everyone in the modern world is rootless, which makes the image of roots and rootlessness too general to have any specific weight. It blunts the sharpness of his critique of Franco's Spain.

Conchi ta, novelist

the and

deus

ex machina who

Antolin

the

extracts both Barea

protagonist

from

their

the

problems,

contradicts both the author's frontispiece and protagonist by returning the image of uprooting to its more specific use of "here" and the victims of the dictators h'lp. When Antolin is

229

worrying about taking Lucia, his replacement daughter, out of the country, Conchita tells him: '" Don't talk nonsense, Antolin, we're all uprooted. And what sort of home have we got? Most young people would give anything to get away to America because there isn't any hope for them here. '" (52 ) Barea's last mention of roots comes on the last page of the novel, where he wants to indicate at the bitter moment of Juan's funeral

a

message

of

hope

for

the

future.

This

hope

lS

personified in decent people like Rufo the UGT man, Conchita the independent spirit and Lucia. But the message is unconvincing, given the uniformly pessimistic tone of the novel, from which one can only extract the conclusion that all the Spanish can do under Franco is emigrate. The message of hope and renewal is merely tacked on. A grave-digger explains to Antolin and Lucia that what looked like "a heap of grey, fretted and splintered bones" are in fact broken roots, which refuse to die. " ... small bundles of whi tish fibres sprouted from odd patches of wrinkled root, lay like floss on the dark earth and seemed to cling to it with weak tenacity. , I f we dug them in where the ground isn't sour, and it rained for three days, the young shoots would start growing,' said the man wi th the spade.'" (53) Just as, on the last page of La ruta, Barea used the mad blind Arab to mock the pretensions of the imperial road-builders; at the end of La raiz rota he uses the gravedigger to affirm faith in the future against the same dark forces. The problems are that in the latter case the argument is not shown and developed artistically; the 'roots' image does not arise from the action; and, besides, the 'roots' image is confused, used differently at different points.

230

S~olism

of this sort was not Barea's forte. Barea's strengths,

as La forja de un rebelde shows so well, were vivid description, especially of working-class life, the quick movement of feelings provoked by a concrete situation, his honesty of observation and These

response.

strengths

are

marred,

but

not

totally

obliterated, in La raiz rota. Chapters 12 and 13 are full of action and succeed in involving the reader in the destiny of Juan and then

his

father.

The

remembers

and

describes

opening

England

to

chapters, Eusebio,

where are

Antolin rich

in

description and set up well London and Mary as counter-weights to Madrid and Antolin's family. The scene-setting of Antolin's family which follows is strong, too. Descriptions of the family's tenement or Dona Felisa' s pension live with the vividness of things Barea had known or seen. Many of the secondary characters are well-sketched: La Tronio the brothel-keeper, Dona Felisa, Don Americo the spiritualist, Juan and his girl-friend.

But the book is very uneven. Other characters, such as the police chief or Colonel Caro,

are plucked straight from a rogues'

gallery. Yndurain justly criticised Barea for his black or white characters, both secondary and principal: "Si nos hacen tan irremediablemente odiosos los personajes de un lado y tan estilizados en belleza moral los otros, no hay manera de sacar consecuencias generales." (54) Of the main characters,

the weakest of all is Conchi ta, who

colours the book with sentimental yearning. She is the prostitute

with

a

heart

of

gold,

the

tough

woman

who

has

retained

sensibility in a bitter world, in short Barea's fantasy of the ideal Spanish woman he would have liked to know.

231

Amalia and Luisa are terrible and unconvincing caricatures. Yet Juan and Pedro are much more rounded and credible. Possibly this had as much to do with Barea' s difficul ty in drawing female characters

as

with his

manicheism.

Manicheism is

the main

criticism arising from the woodenness of these characters made both by Yndurain and the anonymous TLS reviewer, for whom "the characters tend to represent an abstract idea" in the style of Koestler (55). And so Antolin, a more rounded figure, is judged by different standards to those who represent for Barea the various

evils

of

the

Francoist

state:

Father

Santiago

and

.Antol in 's beata daughter (Church), the black marketeers and Pedro (Corruption) ,

the

policemen

(Repression) .

This

.

lS

a

fatal

weakness in the novel.

However, the book is not just an autobiographical projection of how things would have been, had Barea returned to Madrid to see his family. There is, of course,

a lot of this: for example,

Luisa's spiritualism is not so distant from the involvement of Barea's first wife, Aurelia, in a sect (56). But the character of Antolin is not similar to what we know of Barea' s. Both Antolin's indecisiveness and his recognition of the phlegmatic 'Englishness' of his own character as against the passionate 'Spanishness'

of Eusebio and others have li ttle to do wi th

Barea's traits. Antolin does share many things with the author: big things such as his age, his exile, his attachment to England combined with the pain of exile, the contrast in his attitude to women and marriage with his own previous attitude; and lesser details like his eye for pretty women. But,

in creating the

character of Antolin, Barea sought to get away from himself (57).

232

He tried to imagine a man with different traits to himself In Madrid: for this, he gave Antolin a different background (he

lS

a hotel-worker, he has an English lover with whom he shares no passion and no cornmi tment)

and a more analytical, phlegmatic

character. And thus Barea seeks to subject Madrid to a rational, inquiry.

dispassionate

However,

he

imagines

Antolin

insufficiently. Life and spark is lacking.

ortega described the novel with words such as "falseamiento" and phrases like "la fal ta de autenticidad entre 10 vi vido y 10 escrito"

(58). These terms are too strong, in that they imply

intention to deceive: the novel is honest in its intention. But the

contrasts

and

conflicts

are

stereotyped

In

terms

of

nationality (English/Spanish) and character (the bad falangist), features too of his radio broadcasts of the time (see Chapter 7) . Barea showed conclusively he was not able to imagine a world and a protagonist different from his own and himself. The criticisms that Barea's information about Spain was deficient seem of scant importance.

I

f the characters and their problems had come to

life, no-one would worry that a price here or a detail there was not right.

Politics.

La raiz rota is inevitably about politics. But Antolin himself is not a poli tical animal;

and,

as in La llama,

there is a

startling absence of political comment, despite the book being manifestly a denunciation of the Franco dictatorship. The dull Antolin is profoundly disappointed by the failure of political

233

action (59) and, like Barea himself, sees no perspective other than trying to behave decently on a personal level. The peE, as incarnated

in

Juan

and his

link Ram6n,

,

1S

caricatured as

dogmatic, moralistic and ineffective. Barea's own union the UGT, in the shape of Eusebio and Rufo, is seen as warmer and nicer, but does nothing.

This leads

Barea

to

put most weight

on the

activities

of

Conchita, vaguely linked to the UGT through her husband who had been shot. She uses her contacts and wiles to manoeuvre in favour of decency and hopes to make life difficult for the likes of the police chief. But this is no political perspective. And Barea is pessimistically reduced to the rather pompous hope involved in his roots' renewal imagery and the pious aspirations to universal truth expressed in the frontispiece.

LONELINESS of the EXILE?

The novel's stereotyping,

weaknesses of characterisation and

plot, and failure of imagination were all used by Spanish critics in the 1950s as a stick to beat Barea with: a small stick, for one can hardly imagine more than a few dozen people in Spain reading La raiz rota in its British or Argentinian editions. Professor Yndurain, writing in 1953, considered: es el mas descaradamente sectario, mucho menos humano y autentico que su trilogia." (60) "[La raiz rota]

In an obituary notice, Angel Ruiz Ayucar sneered: "Un escritor ingles ... Su obra ... se caracteriza por el virulento sectarismo con que trata los, problemas espanoles ... Pero, en definitiva, seran sus compatrlotas los que hayan de decidir si la desaparacion de Barea supone 0 no un grave quebranto para la literatura inglesa." (61) 234

As in the Embassy-sponsored attacks in South America on the 1956 trip, Ruiz Ayucar uses Barea's English citizenship and praise of England in La raiz rota to discredit his work. For these critics the war was still being fought and they revelled in the weakness of Barea's novel. Josep Maria Castellet wrote in the same month as Ruiz Ayucar the first article published in Spain to praise Barea. His calling Barea un escri tor espanol with "hondas ... raices iber icas" was,

in the codi fied language common under

dictatorship, an implicit rejection of Ruiz Ayucar's ad hominem sneer at the escritor ingles (62). Castellet found Barea's work "desigual, pero toda ella sincera y apasionada" (63). But he too can find little to praise in La raiz rota but honesty: "El error de Barea fue escribir una novela, La raiz rota, que situQ en un Madrid que no conocia y que no supo -- porque no podia -- reflejar con exactitud, a pesar de sus buenos deseos." (64) La

raiz rota is an anguished and serious attempt to discuss

responsibilities and commitments within the terrible dilemmas of exile. Castellet saw Barea as, above all, a lonely writer -- or a writer about loneliness. He suffered "soledad generacional," because he had no Ii terary relationships wi th his generation; "la tremenda soledad del destierro"; and "ese

car~cter

solitario de

su vida" in England (65). And most of all, his constant rebellion against injustice made him lonely.

As has been argued, the facts of Barea's life do not fully bear out this romantic image of him. Nevertheless, La raiz rota, in charting Antolin's conflicting feelings, reveals a great deal of depression and pain about the situation of exile. Antolin is a man weighed down by

the

impossibili ty of acting

to

change

anything in his Madrid family or Spanish society. He was defeated

235

in 1939 and in 1949 remains defeated. Against this terrible defeat, remains only the partial solace of material peace and lack of disturbing passion in England.

It is legitimate to conclude that Barea's loneliness as an exile was real. It is apparent in his writing, as it was in his spoken words

(see

Appendix

5).

Troubled

loneliness did not hinder his

though

he

was

at

times,

finding Ii terary maturi ty and

nourishment in his English exile, where he found some peace of mind. He said about the generic village of his broadcasts: "El carino con que me habian tratado, la ayuda que cada uno me habia prestado, la delicadeza que cada uno puso para que la ayuda no pareciera limosna y no avergonzara, habian restafiado las heridas dolorosas de mi tragedia, habian trocado mi sentimiento hostil y 10 que era aun mas me habian incorporado a la sociedad humana . " ( 66) Barea's participation in English life gave him the environment within which, without the resentment into which, as an uprooted exile, he could so easily have fallen, he could write about his anguish concerning his family and Spain.

*************************

236

NOTES. 1. Yndurain, Francisco, 'Resentimiento espanol,' art.cit., p.73 2. Marra-L6pez develops his arguments in: op.cit., pp.51-130 and pp.289-340 (the chapter on Barea) . 3. Marra-L6pez, J., Ope ci t., p. 90

4. The two exceptions are Mr. One and Bajo la piel, both In El centro de la pista. 5. See general bibliography for titles. 6. Marra-L6pez, Ope cit., p.65. The essay quoted is by: Ayala, Francisco, in La estructura narrativa, (Editorial Critica, Barcelona 1984), pp.181-204. 7.

Marra-L6pez, Ope cit., p.123 ff.

8. Ibid. p.128. La raiz rota, p.261, quoted in Spanish in Marra-Lopez, op.cit., p.338. This is p.231 in the English version.

9.

10. FR, p. 787

11. Only Unamuno, three stories in El centro de la pista and two cri tical essays were wri tten in the 7~ years of Barea' slife after completion of La raiz rota. 12. Gili, Joan, in The Times obituary of Barea (27/12/57) and Benedetti, Mario, art.cit., p.374, refer to another novel. 13. When Barea went to South America in 1956, the BBC made sure he was briefed in Spanish, as they feared his English was inadequate to understand the terms of the trip (WAC, 10/3/56).

14. Weeden, Margaret, 'The Spaniard who carne (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1958).

to

England,'

15. 'A Spaniard in Hertfordshire,' The Spectator, May 1939. 16. It is not known who the Bareas' sponsor was. It may have been the economist Sir Norman Angell, for whom lIsa Barea wrote articles when she was in Paris; possibly a contact from lIsa's Vienna days, such as Hugh Gaitskell; or one of the journalists, like Sefton Delmer, whom Barea knew in Madrid. 17. AbelIan,

Jose Luis, (noviernbre 1977), p.26.

'EI exodo republicano,' Historia 16,

18. Jose Luis AbelIan, art. ci t., quotes Vicente llorens: "Nunca en la historia de Espana se habia producido un exodo de tales proporciones ni de tal naturaleza."

19. The Broken Root, pp.12-14 and 27-29.

237

20. Interviews wi th Gladys Langham, Margaret Carter and Bill Carter (14/11/89) and with Olive Renier (6/7/92). 21. As well as the sources in the previous note, Leonor Rodriguez Barea, Roland Gant and Margaret Weeden supplied me with information on Barea's visits to the Majorca. 22. His lecture in Oxford was to the undergraduate Spanish Club in the 1950s. (Letter to me from Professor Ian Michael, 10/1/90). 23. Barea recommended Cernuda warmly for BBC work (WAC 2/2/47) . 24. Renier, Olive, Before the Bonfire, (London 1984), p.100; and letter from Bill Carter, February 1990. 25. FR, pp.375-380 26. Lorca, p .12 27. FR, pp.379-380 28. Ibid. p.730 29. Ibid. p.730 30. Dos Passos, John, U.S.A.,

(Penguin, London 1976).

31. Ernest Hemingway's articles from Spain were notoriously inadequate and vainglorious. He told Perkins, his editor, that he was saving his best for a novel. The novel, however, For whom the bell tolls was a romantic melodrama which, fine book though it is, was not realistically accurate. See: Barea, Arturo, 'Not Spain, but Hemingway,' Horizon (1941); Knightley, Philip, op.cit., pp.212-214; and Hemingway, Ernest, By-line, (London 1969) for some of his better articles.

32. Lorca, p. 64 33. Ibid. p.68 34. Barea, Arturo,

'Final,' broadcast 13/5/45 (WAC).

35. Quotes from La raiz rota are in English, because I have no copy of the Spanish edition. 36. In the United States, La raiz rota was better received. The New Yorker, the Herald Tribune and Ramon Sender in the New York ~mes all praised the book in reviews. 37. Marra-Lopez, Ope ci t., p. 332 38. Alborg, J-L., op.cit., tomo 11, p.242. 39. Yndurain, F., art. ci t., p. 77. Ironically, Yndu~ain cri ticised Barea for being ignorant about conditions in Spaln, not because he exaggerated how bad the black market was, but because he understated the situation and held up as a scan?al w~a~ ~v~ryone knew about! Yndurain is surely right, however, In crltlclslng as 238

completely.unr~alistic

Barea's writing. that a corpse would be left unburled ln a flat for four days ln mid-summer because of the vengeance of the Church. 40. FG

&

HR, p. 151 .

41. Alborg, J.L., op.cit.,p.238. 42. Ferreras, Juan I~nacio, Tendencias de la novela espanola actual 1939-1969 (Parls 1970), p.103, quoted in FG & HR, p.151. 43. The linking of Erice's film and Cela's novel is an insight by Casimiro Torreiro (Historia del cine espanol, Madrid 1995, pp. 356-357) . 44. Barea' s niece Leonor, who arrived at Faringdon in August 1947, told me that Barea was always questioning her about conditions in Madrid. In her view, criticism of Barea's accuracy is unfounded (Interview with Leonor Rodriguez Barea, 17/9/94). It may well be that Leonor' s arrival gave Barea the idea for this novel. It should also be noted that the first chapter of Struggle for the Sp~nish Soul, written several years previously, contains many details on conditions within Spain, which Barea had gleaned from the radio. There is, therefore, no reason why La raiz rota should be wrong in its factual details. 45. Marra-L6pez, J., op.cit., p.336. 46. The Broken Root, p.7

47. Ibid. p. 9 48. La raiz rota, p.183, quoted in Ortega, Jose, art.cit., p.388. The English version is on page 162 of The Broken Root.

49. The Broken Root, p .194 50. Ibid. p.210 51. Ibid. p.6 52. Ibid. p.291 53. Ibid. p.320 54. Yndurain, F. , art. ci t. , p.78. 55. Anon, Times Literary Supplement, 11/5/51. 56. Interview with LRB, 23/6/90. 59. According to LRB the original for Antolin was Manolo, waiter at the Majorca in Brewer Street (LRB, 17/9/94). 58. Ortega, Jose, art.cit., p.388. 59. The Broken Root, p.29.

239

a

60. Yndurain, F., art.cit., p.77.

61. Ruiz Ayucar, Angel, Arriba, 21/1/58. 62. Castellet, J .M., 'En la muerte de Arturo Barea, novelista espanol,' Papeles de Son Armadans, enero de 1958, p.104.

63. Ibid. p.105 64. Ibid. p.105 65. Ibid. p.103 66. Barea, Arturo, 'Final, '

(WAC) •

-----------------------

240

CONCLUSION.

Arturo Barea was a wri ter wi thin the social realist school, following in a Spanish tradition reaching its peak with Perez Galdos and the more low-life books of Pio Baroja. He was an innovator in his use of autobiography,

an intimate form of

writing linking him, surprisingly, to modernist investigations (e.g. Joyce, Proust) of the writer's own past. This study has tried to place him in the context of the first forty years of the century, which formed him, and whose interpretation is, In turn, assisted by his work.

There is an extraordinary uni ty to Barea' s work.

It is all

focused towards the aims he set himself. What he wrote at the end of La llama and in the introduction to The Track during the early 1940s,

and what he said on the C6rdoba tape the year

before he died, are the same: that he sought to use his own life and experiences as a

touchstone,

to explain the tremendous

upheavals he had lived through.

This thematic unity contributes to the high intensity in Barea's work. Many people have written books twice as long on Lorca and said half as much as Barea. He packs in what he has to say. The same is true of the trilogy:

it is not really long for the

nillOOer of incidents and characters covered. This intensity is seen in the freshness and sharp colour readers find in Barea and is a suggestive reason why his creative flame burnt out rapidly.

241

Arturo Barea' s political views were of no great depth.

His

personal behaviour and tastes were ordinary. There was nothing exceptional about his circumstances. He could easily have faded away into a discontented,

grumbling middle-age,

spending too

little time at home and too much in brothels and bars.

The Civil War made him a writer. It released his potential. Of no other writer can this be said in the same way. All Barea's generation and the subsequent ones have had to come to terms with the Civil War. But only of Barea could it be said that his experience of the war completely altered his trajectory and made him an artist.

The limitations In his wri ting have been discussed in this study:

his

sentimentality,

his

difficulties

with

fictional

creation, his lack of political analysis. What it has not been possible to transmit is the vividness repea ted yet

agaln on

the

the word sounds poor, of his

page

finest

wri ting.

Brutality, honesty, sincerity, crudity ... all these words cited by

critics and throughout this thesis are related to his vivid

intensity.

He

is

the writer

of

scenes,

of pictures,

of a

character glimpsed -- pity he never reached Hollywood!

The most powerful central image of Sender's first novel Iman, the wonderful story of Viance,

the magnet who attracted all

misfortune, is when Viance shelters from the battlefield carnage inside a dead horse.

It is a resonant symbolic image, which

Sender exploits for all its worth:

the poor,

ignorant,

lost

soldier returning to life after his night protected by death.

242

But Barea could not have written it. He wrote of war and death; he wrote of

shells

eviscerating civilians,

of a dead mule

putrefying in a trench wall, but not of Sender's horse Viance's feat is too implausible. psychological

truths

came

from

Barea was a realist:

penetrating

the

core

(1). his of

a

situation, not from symbolic representation.

Barea's gift was neither symbolic nor intellectual. His gift was to see. Differences in talent accepted, his eye was like Goya' s, direct, unflinching and honest. And he worked at his technique and material so that he was able to set down what he saw.

A writer must not be assessed at first from the point of view of theories or comparisons, but rather in his own terms: did he/she achieve what they set out to do? Barea gave us a picture of what Spain was like in the first half of this century, on and under the surface.

He explained the forces

in modern Spain which

underlay the Civil War. He fulfilled his aims.

Barea's reputation continues to loll in the doldrums. Pierre Ressot

in

the most

recent

Jean-

authoritative history of

Spanish Literature wrote: "Los cri ticos coinciden en pensar que la obra de Barea est§. por debajo de la reputacion que ha logrado. , ' La ruta y La llama derivan hacia el, sentlmentallsmo grandilocuente de la mala literatura comprometlda ... Barea forma parte de los escri tores que se sirven de la li teratura para ajustar cuentas con la historia." (2) It depends! It depends on what your view of literature is. If the role

of

a

wri ter

is precisely to

engage wi th his/her

historical period and attempt to explain that period,

243

rather

than the "universal values" often cited as an alternative; then Barea's work is of prime interest. For, scrupulously, he wrote political literature without being propagandist, successfully avoiding crude naturalism, socialist realism (except in Valor y miedo) or flat dry realism, on the one hand, yet never in his skilful descriptions of psychology losing sight of the impact of society on his characters. His reputation lolls in the doldrums because he is consistently judged by other standards.

Barea was not an ordinary writer. He has to be understood as a working-class

wri ter,

using

the

term both to

describe his

origins and his subject-matter. His generational isolation, the fact that he used slang and incorrect forms, the undervaluing of his work because it was first published abroad, the public and critical failure to understand his aims and the care put into his writing, are all related to his being a working-class writer writing about the working-class.

This should not be taken as

special pleading,

for Barea' s

defects are evident and not passed over in this study, but as an essential starting-point. His focus was on the millions who live history without a voice. He left us an examination of the impact of the key event in modern Spanish history, the Civil War, its antecedents and effects, on those millions.

******************** NOTES. 1. The dead mule is in Carabanchel, Chapter VI of Valor y miedo. 2.Ressot, Jean-Pierre, Historia de la Literatura espanola, Siglo XX, (Ariel, Barcelona 1995), Tomo VI. ------------------

244

APPEND IX ONE.

PUBLISHING HISTORY. Arturo Barea's exile in 1938 and the consequent initial publication of nearly all his work in a foreign language, i.e. English, are the causes of inconsistencies in his Spanish texts. These unusual circumstances have given rise both to ignorance by readers and critics of some of his work and controversies about his writing ability and methods of composition. This appendix aims to set the factual record straight and to challenge some of the more prejudicial comments arising from this situation. EARLY WORK.

Arturo Barea tells us that, when at school, he had a number of poems published in Madrileni tos, a magazine of the Escuelas Pias, and some unpaid articles in newspapers during 1913 and 1914 (1). Later, while in Morocco, he contributed to an Army magazine, El Defensor de Ceuta, and earned a few duros writing couplets and pasadobles for the 'artists' of Ceuta's Cafe Cantante (2). Happily, none of these juvenilia survive. The record of Barea' s adul t work begins wi th an unpublished piece written for the journal of the XIIth International Brigade early in the Civil War (3). Then, in June 1937, he wrote an article on the fall of Bilbao (4). It was the publication of this article in Hoja de Lunes, signalling a victory for Barea in his fight to get the military and political commands to allow more items to be passed through the censorship, which led to his starting to broadcast on the radio. VALOR Y MIEDO.

Barea's first paid story was with the help of journalist Sefton Delmer, who arranged for La Mosca (later part of Valor y miedo) to be published in the London Daily Express in October 1937 (5). 245

Barea's first book Valor y miedo was published in Spring 1938 in Barcelona by Publicaciones anti-fascistas de Cataluna at twelve pesetas. It had a photo on the front, another on the back and at least one other photo along with several pen and ink drawings inside. The small print run is not known and a large proportion was sent to Barea in Paris. Several of the stories in Valor y miedo were translated by lisa in Paris, and sold to French magazines (including La Nouvelle Revue Francaise), and Swiss and swedish socialist magazines. (6)

ENGLAND. Barea's second book, and his first in England, was published by Seeker & Warburg in July 1941: Struggle for the Spanish Soul. This is No .10 of a series of pamphlets in the 'Searchlight' series, by a number of well-known writers from the non-Stalinist left. Joyce Cary, 'Cassandra' and George Orwell were other 'Searchlight' authors. Struggle for the Spanish Soul was to have been published in May 1941. But the typescript and first proof were 'destroyed by enemy action' (a fitting trial for an anti-fascist broadside) and it did not actually come out until July, after The Forge (7). In 1941, Barea's break-through year, Cyril Connolly's Horizon published both Not Spain, but Hemingway, his original article on For whom the Bell Tolls, and the horrific short story The Scissors. There would have been therefore some expectation for the release of The Forge by Faber & Faber on June 12th 1941. The volume was widely reviewed and praised, but in its first year sold only a modest 1,027 copies at 10s.6d. (8). It was Faber's most distinguished editor, T.S.Eliot, who dealt with this and Barea's subsequent publications (9). This first edition was translated by Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, British ex-consul in Malaga, who probably assisted in Faber's acceptance of the book (10) •

The Track was published two years later, on July 9 th 1943, also priced 10s.6d. This did a lot better and sold 3,911 copies in the first year. On March 3 rd 1944, Faber brought out Lorca the poet 246

and his people at 7s.6d., which sold a respectable 1,495 copies in the first year.

The Clash was published on February 22 nd 1946 and was the most immediately successful of Barea's books, selling 6,021 in the first year at the price of 12s.6d .. The books continued to sell after the first year, but no figures of sales are available. A new version of The Forge, translated this time by lIsa, had been brought out in 1943 and was reissued on May 1 st after The Clash. This reissue sold 1,109 copies in 12 months at 10s.6d. This same year, The Forging of a Rebel was published in an omnibus edition in the United States by Reynal and Hitchcock. The first paper-backs were to be in 1958 at 2s.6d, an edition which Roland Gant and lIsa pressed on 4-Square. La forja de un rebelde was translated to at least ten languages (11). It is curious to note that Barea's total book sales for the five-year period between 1948 and 1952 placed him fifth in the list of the most translated Spanish authors, behind Cervantes, Ortega y Gasset, Lorca and Blasco Ibanez. Barea was ahead of Santa Teresa, San Juan de la Cruz, Unamuno and Cela! (12). Articles of Ii terary criticism by Barea were published in a number of different magazines, and in two cases as introductions to books, between 1941 and 1953. He also wrote, by lisa's count, about forty short stories, though it is unclear whether this figure includes the twenty pieces of Valor y miedo or not (15). In 1945, Barea co-authored with lIsa a political pamphlet, SPAIN in the post-war world, sold by the Fabian Society at one shilling. This sober Labour Party briefing was possibly commissioned by Lord Faringdon, a Fabian luminary and Arturo's landlord-to-be (16). In 1951 the trilogy was published in Spanish for the first time: in three volumes by Losada in Buenos Aires. This opened up Barea to a potential Spanish audience, slight as it was, confined to literary critics, dissidents (the trilogy did circulate 247

underground In Spain) and exiles (1 7); and a broader Latin American public, who already knew him well as Juan de Castilla, under which name Barea not only broadcast, but wrote several articles.

WAS THE TRILOGY WRITTEN IN ENGLISH OR SPANISH? The 1951 Latin American publication led to a controversy over the genesis of the trilogy, which stemmed from the unusual publishing sequence of Barea's books and was compounded by the poor quality of the Buenos Aires text. In the Buenos Aires edi tion, there are frequent linguistic errors, similar to those in Valor y miedo: 'la-ismos,' the use of 'esto' for 'eso,' etc .. In addition, there are anglicisms: for example, the omission of the relative article and use of English-influenced vocabulary. 'Realizar' is used in its English sense of 'realise' (darse cuenta) and not in its Castilian meaning of 'bring about' (llevar a cabo); 'Jose produjo una botella' instead of trajo or present6; refran instead of estribillo; 'le fascinaba el sujeto' instead of tema etc .. Another fault found was with Barea's originality in punctuation and use of popular language, neither of which were acceptable to critics taking their lead from the Real Academia de la Lengua Espanola (19). It is interesting that Fernandez Gutierrez and Herrera Rodrigo, when defending Barea on his use of slang as recently as 1988, felt the need to go to great lengths to justify Barea's la-ismos and le-ismos (20). Many of his 'errors' are in fact, as argued in Chapter 2, deliberate colloquialisms. However, Spanish critics who were politically hostile to Barea could use these three aspects of carelessness in the text, anglicisms and originality of expression, to highlight Barea's lack of quality. Yndurain argued these points to conclude that Barea's reputation had been artificially inflated by anti-Franco interests (21); other critics of the 1950s dismissed him as a minor 'English' writer (22). This type of attack was a reflection

248

of cultural life under the dictatorship and need not now be taken too seriously. However, the assertion that Barea was a careless and sloppy writer should not be so easily ignored. Marra-L6pez cites this typical syntactical error from La Forja: nEsta es una de las cosas porque yo quiero mucho a mi madre" (23) •

On this error, Marra-L6pez then comments: n[Esta es] ... una de las muchas incorrecciones gramaticales ~e el espl~ndido y intuitivo Barea comete. Llevar la cuenta seria prolijo." (24) Marra-L6pez is wrongly assuming here that Barea's sloppy grammar is an integral part of his freshness and intuitiveness. Later in the same article, Marra-L6pez adds: " [La rai z ro ta es] ... infamemen te retraducida ... igual que sus libros anteriores."

escrita

o

(25 )

What actually happened was that Barea wrote in Castilian; the books were translated into English, then published. When the time came for the Spanish-language version of La forja de un rebelde, Barea's original version ei ther no longer existed or only existed in part. Barea's sloppiness in writing is, therefore, not because of his fresh spontanei ty, but because he was sloppy in wri ting the 're-translation, , the second Spanish version reconstructed by him and lIsa from the English version. That this is what occurred is supported by the fact that there is no translator credited for the Losada 1951 or subsequent editions. The fact that there are three additional chapters in the Spanish language version, which do not occur in any of the English versions, also confirms that Barea worked on the Losada version at later dates than those of the original composition (26). Owing to the non-existence of the original Spanish-language manuscripts, questions have also been raised as to whether lIsa Co-wrote the trilogy. This can be directly rebutted by the 249

evidence of Olive Renier and Margaret Rink, lIsa's translation assistants (27). Moreover, in her preface to the Argentinian edition of Unamuno, Ilsa explains that there never was a full spanish-language manuscript of this work: this was, she goes on, because she and Arturo co-authored Unamuno, but this collaboration was completely different from Barea' s practice wi th his earlier books (28).

A final insinuation is that it was not Arturo Barea at all who wrote the trilogy. This is implied, though not at all maliciously, in Gimenez-Frontin's repetition of earlier rumours in a 1986 newspaper article: "[La trilogia fue] ... originalmente escrita en lengua inglesa." (29) The statement is again categorically rebutted by Rink and Renier's direct evidence, apart from considerable internal consistency between Valor y miedo and La forja de un rebelde (30). And Barea himself, of course, was not capable of writing them in English.

LAST BOOKS.

Barea's last published novel -- for some critics, his first! -The Broken Root was issued by Faber at 15/- in 1951 and sold 1,982 copies in its first year. It was published soon after in the U.S.A. and in Denmark. Losada issued a Buenos Aires edition, La raiz rota, in 1955. On March 9 th , 1951 Faber issued a cheap (5/-) edition of The Forge, but it sold only 199 copies. Barea's popularity had declined. In his obituary of Barea, Joan Gili referred to another novel Barea was working on (31). And as early as 1951, Mario Benedetti reported a title, Los guardianes de sus hermanos (32). There is no evidence that Barea ever wrote anything of this proj ected novel. It is of interest that he wished to write another book. That he did not, supports the impression given by La raiz rota: Barea was burned out as a writer. He had covered the subj ect matter that stimulated him and had lost the necessary imaginative

250

intensity. Only three known stories of his were written after La raiz rota (33). Barea's last book published in his lifetime was Unamuno. This short sixty-one page study of the thinker was issued by Bowes & Bowes in 1952 as part of a series 'Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought'. It was commissioned, via lIsa, by the series' editor Erich Heller, a Cambridge professor of Austrian origin, who offered Barea the choice of Unamuno or Ortega y Gasset (34). POSTHUMOUSLY. According to lIsa, Barea often intended to collect the stories he liked, but never did (35). After his death, she selected the contents of the collection El Centro de la Pista, which was published in Madrid by Cid editions in 1960. El centro de la pista is a minor landmark In Spanish publishing history. It was the first post-war work of fiction published within Spain by a Republican supporter who had gone into exile at the end of or during the Civil War. A twenty-one year silence was broken. The Franco censorship had never been consistent; and as it was forced by political circumstances to begin to liberalise in the 1960s, it was even less so. The censorship had operated on two levels: publishers had to submit books to the censor before and after publication. At times therefore a book could be withdrawn from circulation after publication, leaving the publisher out of pocket and wi th no redress: a policy designed to encourage self- censorship, much more insidious and effective than direct prohibition. In Barea's own words: "If he [a publisher] wants to forestall this vague b~t ever-present danger, he will prefer not to print a book when In doubt." ( 3 6)

By 1960 Cid publishers were prepared to run this risk. They seem to have been able to do so without problems. The publication of Marra-L6pez's book in 1962 was another indicator of a change in cultural climate. Marra-L6pez and literary critics such as Alborg, Castellet and Nora, as well as publishers, were 251

interested in getting Sender, Aub, Alberti, Ayala, Barea and other exiles read within Spain. The fact too that El centro de la pista was a minor book by a dead wri ter must have made publication easier. It is highly unlikely that La forja de un rebelde could have been published within Spain in 1960; and even less so, had Barea been still alive to broadcast and write on the fact. It was not until 1977, twenty years after Barea's death, and also after the dictator's, that the readership he had written for could finally have full access to the trilogy. However, despi te subsequent reprintings in Spain and England, and in spite of a six-part nine-hour television series of La forja de un rebelde, broadcast in 1990, Barea has not been widely read (37). Lorca, Unamuno and La raiz rota have never been published in Spain. reasons The for this relative neglect are varlous. Gimenez-Frontin suggested that: " ... incomprensiblemente, Barea no fue 'recuperado' en el momento hist6rico que en justicia le correspondia ... Tal vez, bien pensado, Barea fuera un plato demasiado crudo, demasiado luminoso como para tener a los editores de aquellos anos [desde mediados de los 60 hasta mediados de los 70] de autocontrolada y comedida apertura." (38) Moreover, Barea died relatively young, so could not be one of the exiles publishing or writing articles in the Spanish press from the late 60s on. And unlike many of his contemporaries, he was unable to stimulate interest in his work by actually returning from exile and being interviewed in the media. Further factors in the neglect of Barea are that his work is hard to classify: fiction? autobiography? Its standard is uneven. He did not belong to any school. He did not have the status of a 'modern classic.' Nor did Barea fit easily into any political slot: despite his PCE sympathies in the Civil War, La Llama is implicitly critical of the PCE. And his later path was too independent for the PCE to want to promote his re-publication.

252

And the UGT, to which Barea gave his most consistent political loyalty, did not involve itself in promoting its past. Despite the reissuing of his major works and the television series, Arturo Barea still remains, in Gimenez-Frontin's words, una asignatura pendiente (39). The problems he tackled are no longer of such burning immediacy to Spanish readers keen to forget their past. And both politically and academically he remains a plato crudo, difficult to define. There is still no room for the self-taught son of a laundry-woman in Spanish letters. ********************

253

NOTES. 1. FR, pp.375-376 2. Ibid. p.391

3. Ibid. p.660 4. Ibid. pp.722-723

5. Ibid. p.749 6. Ibid. p.782

The detail about enemy action destroying the proofs lS recorded on the ti tIe page of Struggle for the Spanish soul. Bernard Crick's introduction to George Orwell's The lion and the unicorn, pp.15-17, supplies further information about the 'Searchlight' publishing project. 7.

8. These figures of sales for the first year, as all subsequent sales figures, are taken from a letter to me from Constance Cruikshank, archivist at Faber and Faber, 6/6/90. Faber and Faber's files concerning T.S.Eliot, which very probably contain correspondence with Barea, will not be released until Valerie Eliot's biography of T. S. Eliot is completed. Valerie Eliot has not been prepared either to inform me what correspondence between Faber and Barea exists or to let me look at any of it. 9.

10. Letter to me from Margaret Weeden, 1/11/92.

11. The Daily Collegian, State College, Pennsylvania, 28/2/52. (Penn. State Archive, 31/3/52). 'Obituary of Arturo Barea,' The Times, 28/12/57. As well as in English and Spanish, La forja de un rebelde was published in Italian (by Garzanti, Milan), Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, French (by Gallimard), Danish (translated by lIsa Barea's sister Lotte), Czech and Norwegian. Source: covers of Buenos Aires first editions. Later it was published in German. 12. Undated and unsourced 1952 Spanish press cutting, referring to the Index Traslationum de la Unesco, in possession of Barea's niece, Leonor Rodriguez Barea. 13. Barea, Arturo, Letters of 21/8/47 and 30/10/47 (WAC).

Press statement by Pennsylvania State College, 1952. 14.

February,

15. Barea, lIsa, in Barea, A., El centro de la pista, p.43. Note 52, Chapter 8, explains that lIsa Barea probably does not tell the whole truth here.

254

16. Lord Faringdon was a Labour peer, who In 1938 provided accommodation in the grounds of Buscot Park for one of the colonies of Basque refugee children. The Bareas went to live in one of the l?dges i? June ,194~. Howe~e~, ,given Lord Faringdon's involvement ln Spanlsh solldarlty actlvltles during the Civil War and after, it seems very likely that the Bareas knew him previously. Interview wi th Gladys Langham, ex-secretary Faringdon Labour Party, 14/11/89; Bell, Adrian, Only for Three Months, (Norwich 1996) . 17. Interview with Nicolas Riter, 23/6/90, who told me that when he was working on the railways in Madrid in the 1950s, La forja de un rebelde was one of the illegal books that passed from hand to hand. 18. de Nora, Eugenio, La novela espanola contemporanea, (Gredos, Madrid 1982), Tomo 11, pp.15-16.: "El estilo de Barea esta afeado por algunas impropiedades que le hacian mejor la traducci6n." 19. Aranguren, J-Luis, art. cit.; Yndurain, art. cit.; Alborg, Ope cit., inter al .. 20. FG Y HR, op.cit., pp.55-67. 21. Yndurain, art. cit .. 22. E.g. Ruiz Ayucar, Angel, in Arriba (?), 21/1/58: "Recientemente ha fallecido el escritor ingles Arturo Barea ... en definitiva, seran sus compatriotas los que hayan que decidir si la desaparici6n de Barea supone 0 no un grave quebranto para la li teratura inglesa. Los espafioles bastante tenemos con ocuparnos de nuestras casas." 23. FR, p.14, quoted in Marra-L6pez, Ope cit., p.292. 24. Marra-Lopez, Ope cit., p.292. 25. Marra-Lopez, Ope cit., p.332. 26. The three extra chapters in the Spanish language version are all from La ruta: Part One, Chapter IX and Part Two, Chapters III and VII. 27. Letters to me from Olive Renier, 6/4/92; and Margaret Weeden, 1/11/92. 28. Barea, Ilsa, Unamuno (Buenos Aires 1959), prefacio, pp.7-9. 29. Gimenez-Frontin, Jose-Luis, La Vanguardia, 8/5/86. 30. Letters quoted in Note 27. 31. The Times, 28/12/57. "When he died he was at work on another

novel" . 32. Benedetti, Mario, art. cit., p.374.

255

33. The dating is taken from El centro de la pista. The stories are: Baja la piel, La rifa and La lecci6n. 34. Barea, lIsa, Unamuno, preface. lIsa also comments that ~amuno was a book aimed at English students, who would be "casi totalmente ignorante en cuanto a Unamuno se referia." Ironically, the essay in this series on Lorca was written by Barea's political opponent and BBC colleague, the South African pro-Franco poet Roy Campbell. Yndurain (art. ci t.) saw Campbell's book as a successful rebuttal of Barea's own book on Lorca. 35. Barea, lIsa, in introduction, p.45.

Barea,

A.,

El

Centro

de

la

pista,

36. Barea, Arturo, 'New writing in Franco Spain,' London Forum (1946), Vol l.i, p.63. 37. "TVE estrena La forja de un rebelde, la producci6n mas ambiciosa de su historia. La obra dura nueve horas y ha supuesto una inversi6n superior a los 2.000 millones de pesetas." (El Pais, 30/3/90). Barea's niece, Leonor, considered that the TVE production showed Arturo as too much the passive observer. It neither caught the happy side she remembered, nor showed him as a participant in events. (Interview with Leonor Rodriguez Barea, 23/6/90).

38. Gimenez-Frontin, art. cit .. 39. Ibid.

256

APPENDIX 2.

1. Chronological table of the editions in English and Spanish of Barea's boo ks .

2. Chronological table of stories and articles published by Arturo Barea.

1. Chronological table of the edi tions in English and Spanish of

Barea' s

boo ks .

Date

Title

Publisher

Published In

Other info

Summer 1938

Valor y miedo

Publicaciones Antifascistas de Catalufia

Barcelona

With 12 prints. Not found.

June 12 1941

The Forge

Faber & Faber

London

Trans. by ChalmersMitchell

July 1941

Struggle for the Spanish Soul

Seeker & Warburg

London

Searchlight pamphlet 10

1943

The Forge

Faber & Faber

London

Trans. by Ilsa Barea: reprinted 1946 & 1951

July 9 1943

The Track

Faber & Faber

London

Foreword by Barea

March 3, 1944

Lorca, the poet and his people

Faber & Faber

London

August 1945

Spain in the post-war world

Fabian Publications

London

Feb 22 1946

The Clash

Faber & Faber

London

1946

The Forging of a rebel

Reynal & Hitchcock

New York

257

Written with Ilsa Barea

Trilogy in one volume

.-

1949

Lorca, the poet and his people

Harcourt & Brace

New York

1951

La forja, La ruta, La llama

Losada

Buenos Aires

April 20 1951

The broken root

Faber & Faber

London

1952

Unamuno

Bowes & Bowes

Cambridge

1953

Unamuno

Yale Univ. Press

New Haven, U.S.A.

Aug 19 1955

La raiz rota

Santiago Rueda

Buenos Aires

1956

Lorca

Losada

Buenos Aires

1958

The Forge, The Track, The Clash

Four Square

London

First in paperback at 3s9d.

1959

Unamuno

Editorial Sur

Buenos Aires

Trans. by Rodriguez Monegal

1959

La forja de un rebelde

Ediciones Montjuich

Mexico, D.F.

Reprinted in 1965

1960

El centro de la pista

Ediciones Cid

Madrid

No.26, Col. Altor

1972

The Forging of a rebel

Davis-Poynter

London

Omnibus edition

1973

Lorca

Cooper Square

New York

1974

The Forge, The Track, The Clash

Quartet

London

1975

The Forging of a Rebel

Viking

New York

Omnibus edition

1977

La forja, La ruta, La llama

Turner

Madrid

First Spanish publication - reprinted 1984

1980

Valor y miedo

Jose Esteban

Madrid

1984

Valor y miedo

Terceto

Barcelona

258

Reprinted in 1954, 1958 & 1966

With lIsa Barea

Reprinted by Plaza & Janes 1986

-1984

The Forge, The Track, The Clash

Fontana

London

Flamingo paperback

1985/6

La forja de un rebelde, La ruta, La llama

Plaza y Janes

Barcelona

Despite title, 1st vol. only contains La forja. Reprinted in 1990.

1988

El centro de la pista

Diputaci6n de Badajoz

Badajoz

Intro by Maria Herrera

April 1993

La forja, La ruta, La llama

Plaza y Janes

Barcelona

Number 154, Biblioteca de Autor

2. Chronological table of stories and articles published by Barea.

Date

Title

Where

Type

June 1937

La caida de Bilbao

Hoja de Lunes, Madrid

Article

October 1937

The Fly

London Daily Express

Story

May 1939

A Spaniard in Hertfordshire

The Spectator

Article

c .194 0

Various ...

La Nouvelle Revue franc;aise

Stories

Comment

Trans. of stories from VM

1940

Brandy

Penguin Parade, 7

Story

Translation of Conae from VM

1941

The Scissors

Horizon

Story

Reprinted in Horizon Stories 1943

May 1941

Not Spain -but Hemingway

Horizon

Lit crit

March IApril 1942

Lorca

Horizon

Lit crit

259

In two parts

-

April 1943

The Track

Faber & Faber

september 1943

The Spanish Labyrinth

Horizon

Book Review

April 1945

The Indivisibility of Freedom

In: Freedom for Spain

Speech, London, 31/3/45.

Winter 1946

New writing in Franco Spain

London Forum l.i

Lit crit

1946

Realism In Modern Spanish Novel

Focus 2

Lit crit

Not found

Winter 1947

Ortega and Madariaga

Universi ty Observer (Chicago)

Lit crit

'A journal of politics'

Late 1947 or Jan. 1948

Re: Spanish writers

Contact

Lit crit

Not found

1948

Intro. to The dark wedding by Ram6n Sender

Grey Walls Press, London

Lit crit

July 21 st 1950

Un grupo de inefables viejecitos

El Mercur i 0, Santiago de Chile

Anecdotical article

Spring 1953

A quarter century of Spanish writing

Books Abroad xxvii, New York

Lit crit

1953

Introduction to The Hive by C.J.Cela

Victor Gollancz

Lit crit

With Barea's foreword, never pub. in any Span. edition

** 1957

La Lecci6n

La Naci6n, Buenos Aires

Story

November 1964

Big Granny

Argosy

Story

Socialist Vanguard pamphlet

Similar to his BBe talks.

Trans. JM Cohen "in consultation with" Barea.

Translation of La lecci6n

Following Cela' s Nobel Prize, this translatio~ w~s issue~ in paperback by Sceptre (London) in 1992, wi thout Barea. s lnt~oductlon, but with his help in the translation acknowledged. Glven hls reduced participation, his name was aptly reduced to 'Arturo Bare' .

**

260

Notes: 1. The original places of publication of many of the stories later collected in El centro de la pista have not been located. There are other stories not collected in that volume, whose titles and places of publication have not been found, either. 2. A number of Barea's radio broadcasts as Juan de Castilla were spoken essays about writers and writing. He spoke about at least the following: Gabriela Mistral (12/9/44); Don Segundo Sombra (7/11/44); Carlos Maria Ocantos (1944); Ciro Alegria (10/4/1945); Romulo Gallegos (22/5/45). 3. More than one of Barea's stories were also broadcast on the BBC. The only definite date is 28/11/58, when Grandmother's Lesson, translation of La lecci6n, was broadcast. Barea sometimes referred to his more anecdotical war-time broadcasts as stories. 4. A tape of part of a radio interview with Barea, recorded in May 1956 in Cordoba, Argentina, exists. This is referred to in the thesis as the 'Cordoba tape'. *************************

261

APPENDIX 3.

ILSE POLLAK/ILSA BAREA. (1902 - 1972) BACKGROUND. lisa's background was very different from Arturo's. She came from a comfortably-off and cultured family. Whereas Arturo came to politics by his own experience as a worker, lIsa's family was liberal and she became involved with the left during her time at University. She was born in Vienna on September 20, 1902, five years to the day after Arturo Barea (1). Her father was Jewish, but non-practising; her mother from a Catholic military background. Such a meeting of opposites was not infrequent in the liberal Vienna of the late 19 th century; and there lS every indication that lIsa was brought up without any religious influence (2). In her adult life she never practised Catholicism nor Judaism, though that was not to inhibit the Duque de Primo de Rivera, Spanish Ambassador in London, from referring to her in 1956 as "una refugiada judia" (3). Though lIsa's mother, Alice von Zieglmayer, had a "rose-coloured" memory of imperial glory, lisa tells us she herself was Republican from her teens (4). Her father, Dr Valentin Pollak, was born in 1871 and had some fame as co-author of a literary reader "Pollak, Jellinek and Streinz" in common use in schools in the 1920s. He became the Principal of a well-known boys' school in Vienna; and spent long years accumulating notes for a history of education in Austria; the notes for which he had to abandon when leaving Vienna in 1938 (5). Pollak was a supporter of the right-wing of social democracy. Arturo Barea gives an ironic account of Adler's visit to Madrid during the Civil War (6); and it is easy to imagine lisa's view of Dr Pollak behind the sketch. But her political differences certainly did not stop her and Arturo welcoming both her parents in England when they fled Austria. After being interned, the 262

pollaks lived with the Bareas from late 1939 until their deaths in Faringdon in the late 1940s. lIsa was to dedicate to their memory the only book she published solely in her name: Vienna.

COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM. culturally, lIse Pollak (born lIse, she became widely-known as lIsa after 1936: herself often using the name) was formed by the great Conununist movement that swept across Europe after the First World War. She was also, in her own view, of a generation that was the last to feel the revolutionary breath of 1848 (7). She went to University in Vienna after the World War and eventually graduated in Economics and Sociology. More importantly she was, from 1918 on, a political activist (8). She plunged into student debates, agitations and disputes; and at University, though whether as a founder member or not is unclear, joined the new Austrian Conununist Party. Without becoming a central leader, she was in the 1920s a prominent member of what was always a small party. She wrote articles for the press and may have been for a time a full-time worker for the party. In 1925 she was sent to Budapest on a Comintern mission to channel funds to a Romanian opposi tion leader. Something went wrong and lIsa spent four months in a Hungarian jail. She left the Conununist Party after her release. According to her own account, she felt the Comintern should have helped her more and at least reimbursed her legal expenses (9). Back ln Vienna, she became active in education and propaganda work on the left wing of the powerful Social Democratic Party. The early thirties was the period of increasing Nazi pressure on Austria and the growth of an indigenous fascist movement, the Heimwehr, within the country. The Social Democrats had governed Vienna since the First World War and had instituted a massive progranune of "municipal socialism". Hundreds of thousands of working-class people had been re-housed in tower-blocks, where 263

services were cheap and facilities numerous. This was one of the most far-reaching attempts to build a socialist "island" within a capitalist state; and the principal reason why the Austrian communist Party remained relatively small. llsa had at least two close emotional relationships during this period; one with Kolamar Wallisch, a leader of the Schutzbund workers' self-defence organisation in the Viennese suburb of styria. He was hanged by the Dollfuss regime after the final defeat of the workers during the "February events" of 1934 (10). At some stage, probably in the early '30s, she married Leopold Kulcsar, also a working-class leader. We are indebted to Arturo Barea for a description of "Poldi" ,in Barcelona shortly before the latter's death in 1938 (11). Kulcsar and Ilsa became leaders of a small underground current wi thin the Social Democratic Party, called "The Spark". The name was taken from the faction Lenin had led (Iskra) within the Russian Social-Democratic Party thirty years before; and suggests that Ilsa's early abandonment of the Conununist Party permi tted her to maintain a fighting corrununist line, whereas those who stayed wi thin the Party to follow the vagaries of Stalin's foreign policies were often immobilised as revolutionary fighters. "The Spark" started to organise in 1932/3 a military and political resistance within the Social-Democratic Party as an alternative to the Bauer and Adler leadership's passive response to the inuninent threat of the right's dismantling the party and its achievements. On February 12, 1934, the Government moved against the workers' organisations: there were tens of thousands of willing fighters in the Social-Democratic ranks, but Bauer's pacifist policies had left them with no political nor material means to defend themselves. Small bands of armed fighters, some organised by "The Spark", attempted to organise resistance. But the movement had already been defeated by the failure of its leadership. Leopold Kulcsar was one of those arrested,· and rlsa (in a curious minor twist of history) took refuge in the one-room flat of Hugh 264

Gaitskell. Gaitskell, Dora Gaitskell, Kim Philby and Stephen spender were just some of the many English socialists attracted to "Red Vienna" during this period after Hi tIer's coming to power, whom lIsa met (12). lIsa stayed in Vienna for several months after the February events, probably until her husband left prison. She rented a large flat (with her parents' money?) in the Herrengasse and Gaitskell then stayed with her for a period. She did underground political work until, in late '34, she left the city for exile in Prague, where the great majority of Social-Democratic leaders who had escaped were attempting to reorganise (13). In Prague after the Austrian defeat, there was a massive swing from the Social-Democrats to the Communists among the exiles. Kulcsar was one of those who joined the Party, and one may trace in his excessive rigidity, as Arturo portrays him, some of the zeal of a reformed Austro-Marxist to prove himself before the Comintern (14) . It is clear that in the '20s lIsa had left the Communist Party without renouncing Communist ideals, which, as in the case of other left-wing Austro-Marxists, laid her open to persecution by the Stalinists. Arturo Barea tells us, in La Llama, that an important factor in his and lIsa's exclusion from influence in Madrid in 1937 was the 'whispering campaign' that lIsa was a Trotskyist (15). The exact political reasons for lIsa leaving the Communist Party in the '20s are however not clear. The underlying reason, if not the immediate, was probably the Party's failure to take root in Austria. But she did not become a Trotskyist, nor a public critic of the Communists either in Prague or Madrid, or later in England. Indeed, her experiences in Spain, which she talked about frequently in Britain during the 1940s and '50s, do not appear to have led to any overall critique of the Soviet Union. Indeed she sometimes liked to talk of her friendships wi th Russian generals (16). However, she "never denied the existence of Stalinist terror" (17). Like many people moving away from political militancy, the question became less urgent for her. The 265

contradiction between her own experience and what she thought, was not put under pressure. SPANISH CIVIL WAR. lisa arrived in Madrid from Valencia without her husband and on borrowed money in early November 1936. She had used contacts in socialist papers in Norway and Czechoslovakia to somehow persuade the Spanish Embassy in Paris to pay for her to come to Spain to assist in the Press Department (18). She was a very insistent and determined person. And like many of her generation, especially the Germans and Austrians, she recognised in the Spanish Civil War another, and possibly the last, chance to combat fascism. For the next 21 years her life was to be totally involved with Arturo Barea. But their meeting was not auspicious. Barea was exhausted and irri table, after weeks wi th little sleep. The Government had fled to Valencia during the crucial early November days of the siege of Madrid. Ilsa, just arrived, was at once evacuated to Valencia along with the rest of the Press Department. She managed to get back rapidly to Madrid from Valencia, on the grounds that her presence in Madrid would mean there was at least one left-wing journalist there. But Barea was ill-disposed to anyone who had fled to Valencia and describes their first meeting with his customary (up till then, at least) disdain for women: "La mujer se sent6 frente a mi al otro lado de la mesa: una cara redonda, con ojos grandes, una nariz romana, una frente ancha, una masa de cabellos oscuros, casi negros, alrededor de la cara, y unos hombros anchos, tal vez demasiado anchos, embutidos en un gaban de lana verde, 0 gris 0 de algun col?r que la luz violada hacia indefinido. Ya habia pasado los trelnta y no era ninguna belleza. GPara que demonios me mandaban a mi una mujer de Valencia? Ya era bastante complicado con los hombres. Mis sentimientos, todos, se rebelaban contra ella." (19) Disciplined militant, Ilsa did not quarrel with his "mala gana" and "displicente" tone and began to use her knowledge of English, French, German and Italian to collaborate wi th the foreign journalists (20). At his boss's Rubio Hidalgo's telephoned suggestion from Valencia, Barea offered her a job in the Press Censorship. The rest, as they say, is history ... Arturo's 266

sentimientos changed. lIsa's sang-froid before the shelling and bombing, her dedication and competence, her boca deliciosa drew Arturo to her (21). There is no direct evidence as to lIsa's feelings. By Arturo's account, they spent all their time together; working night and day, eating together and sleeping on the camp beds in the Telef6nica. They spent their limited moments of free time together too and within a few weeks were lovers. Ilsa telephoned, then went to see, her husband, the ill-fated Leopold Kulcsar, in Valencia or Barcelona. Kulcsar, wi th digni ty, agreed to a divorce, though told her he hoped to win her back. Later Kulcsar himself confirmed the strength of lIsa's and Arturo's relationship: "Nos cont6 [Poldi] que los [lIsa y Arturo] habia hallado felices como nlnos; era conmovedor el ver 10 encantados que estaban el uno con el otro." (22) Ilsa Kulcsar rapidly became a famous figure in the Telef6nica (23). She had an endless capacity for work and was domineering and "bossy" (24). Peter Heller, who worked with her a few years later in the BBC, described her as "dominant, not domineering ... She didn't let things rest" (25). To Olive Renier, who also worked at the BBC, she was "very dominating, but good value ... very serious ... of sterling character, very brave, intelligent" (26). To journalist Sefton Delmer, who knew her in Madrid, she was "highly intelligent" (27). Intelligent and dominating are the adjectives that consistently crop up in peoples' comments about lIsa. Although formally Barea's assistant, lIsa had more contact than he with the foreign journalists. These were respectful and very careful of lIsa, who was aware of her power (28). Arturo and lIsa worked together in the censorship for nine months. They were in some ways a strange couple. The rather cadaverous, haunted-looking Barea and the "short, plumpish, ungainly" lIsa (29). The Spaniard who had not found himself, socialist but with traditional ideas about women; and the Austrian life-long Communist/Socialist militant. 267

After New Year 1936/7, lisa officially became Arturo's deputy in the press censorship, work which they both found of consuming interest. They believed in its value. While Arturo won his battles to tell the truth about Republican defeats and not just present the rosy picture, lisa often supplied the original ideas, was tireless in pursuing useful contacts and pushed Arturo forward. Neither of them had much liking for the jaded alcoholic worlds of journalists and Soviet commissars In the Hotel Victoria. They preferred their own company (30). During this period, both lisa and Arturo lived under the most intense pressure: of work, of the closeness of death, and also of the harm they were doing to their respective husband and wife. In Autumn 1937, with Arturo's health ¢eteriorating and a poli tical campaign starting against them, the couple went on leave to the Levante. On their return, things had changed. They had lost their jobs as censors: and the plausible, given her past, but false campaign that lisa was a Trotskyist was in full swing. In fact, lisa decided not to, and persuaded Arturo not to, fight these attacks, on the grounds that any public row could only give solace to the Republican side's enemies. It was a mistaken policy to keep silent (See Note 33, Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion), something easier to perceive with 60 years' hindsight. But there were enough people at the time who spoke out against Stalin and the PCE' s disastrous policy in Spain: Dos Passos (whom lisa knew) and Orwell were two famous foreign journalists who did. The POUM and the anarchists of course also did. But Hemingway, Gellhorn and lisa and Arturo were among the majority who opted for silence. lisa showed her strength in another way. "Sin ella, [Arturo Barea] hubiese muerto," said Professor Fernandez Gutierrez (31). It was her determination that dragged an increasingly fatalistic and depressed Barea out of Spain, before they were killed or arrested. The story of that trip is told in La llama. It was, first, lisa's ability to pull strings with the powerful Soviet

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interrogator Kulcsar, and then various friends of Barea, that achieved on 22 nd February 1938 her and Arturo's exit from Spain, via La Jonquera in Catalonia.

With Arturo, lisa spent almost a year living in Paris in poverty under the hanging sword of the impending war. She lived by occasional translations and selling her own articles and some translations of Arturo's stories. She was not well in Paris, suffering from the nervous reaction to her supreme efforts over the previous 18 months and from the sudden death of Kulcsar on 28 th January, which had allowed her and Arturo to marry a week before leaving Barcelona. She had rheumatic pains and often lay in bed with a temperature. Her chain-smoking and malnourishment would not have helped. "A menudo pasabamos hambre, " Barea tells us baldly (32).

B.B.C. MONITORING SERVICE.

lisa Barea went to work for the BBC Monitoring Service at Wood Norton in August 1939. She found a large, ramshackle house in the small village of Fladbury, 4 miles from Evesham and 2 from the BBC, where Arturo, her parents recently released from internment and Margaret Weeden joined her. The Monitoring Service was in rapid expansion, spurred by the imminence of war. Its function was to listen to and transcribe broadcasts from other countries. As the war developed the Service's reports became a key element in helping to shape British foreign policy. lisa spoke five European languages, -- though in all of them, despi te her fluency, she had a Viennese accent. Many of the Service's new recruits were exiles from Central Europe. Ilsa was effective at her job, as Margaret Weeden recorded: "1 found myself sitting beside a short, heavily built woman with a large mop of rather frizzy hair who at ,once ,addressed me in German, to my fury. Fortunately, lisa Barea s smlle and ch~rm Soon overcame this bad start, and it did not take,l?ng to reallse that here was someone of quite exceptional ablll ty. W,hen ~he first German news bulletin was broadcast 1 remember watchlng Wl th amazement as she scrawled a few odd words or phrases almost at 269

random across pa~e after page, while I struggled with shorthand. Then I watched wlth even greater amazement as she typed out an almost verbatim translation." (33) Among other broadcasts, lisa Barea often monitored the radio speeches of Franco and Hitler (34): her information is reflected in Arturo's radio broadcasts, where his parodies of and comments on the Nazi leaders often show a detailed knowledge of what they actually said. lisa worked hard, starting on the eight-hour night shift. But was moved to the 4pm to midnight shift, both because many of interesting broadcasts were during these hours and because was not strong. In winter she found walking the 2 miles from BBC to Fladbury too much (35).

she the she the

The Moni toring Service shared premises during the first two years of the war with some units of the BBC's also fledgling foreign language broadcasts service. lisa's contacts with people in the Latin American Service eventually got her husband some broadcasting work, which was to turn into the Juan de Castilla talks (see Chapter 7). Since leaving Spain, she had been the couple's maj or bread-winner; but this si tuation shifted as Arturo got more and more work with the BBC. In 1941, lisa became involved in a controversy, interesting in itself and also for light it throws on her personality. She spoke out in criticism of the Spanish Service, calling those in charge "crypto-fascists" for the content of the broadcasts to Spain (see Chapter 7). lisa must often have had to use her training in politics to help her bite her tongue, in order not to compromise longer-term aims of fighting fascism by short-term outbursts at some of the reactionary poli tics of the BBC hierarchy. The outburst described above, made by a foreign refugee in a time of war about a part of the Service other than what she was working in, was risky for her own position and must have been provoked by considerable tension. On the question of Spain, it was clearly impossible for her to always keep silent.

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She and Arturo were both caught in a contradiction working for the BBC. It is a constant tension in lIsa's letters (36): and was a greater pressure on her than on her husband. She was both more of a political thinker than him, and more to the left. The letter of application she wrote to the BBC on behalf of Arturo in 1939 (see also Chapter 7) displays a trait which runs through all her letters, and which those who knew her recall from her speech: she was verbose, she didn't know when to stop talking (37). As in this letter, she frequently betrays her fears or desires by saying too much -- although at work in the Telef6nica and at the BBC, and in her book Vienna, she showed she knew how to be self-disciplined. lisa moved with the Moni toring Service to Caversham in 1943, then left the Service towards the end of the war. She had been a valued monitor and left of her own free will. As the war drew to a close, there was no longer a pressing justification to stifle her opinions. And also, she looked to a future career as writer and translator.

TRANSLATOR. During the war, lIsa continued her literary translations. Her first work in this area had been in Barcelona and Paris, then in England, translating Arturo's stories and articles (38). The first book she tackled was La ruta, the second volume of Arturo's trilogy, in 1942. She went on to translate La llama, then to re-translate La forja, originally translated by Chalmers-Mi tchell. Ilsa collaborated on the trilogy wi th two English friends, Olive Renier, who read galleys and typescripts, and wi th Margaret Rink, whose role was "more basic ... helping wi th the translation" (39). lIsa also had of course the great benefit for a translator of being able to consul t the author whenever she wished. Her strength as a translator is not that she always understood correctly the Spanish: sometimes she didn't, especially in La 271

ruta. Nevertheless, the errors in her translations are of little consequence: in itself a rare achievement for a non-native translating between two second languages. But she was also an excellent translator of li terature, by which is meant three things: she had the capacity to express tone and nuance across a change in language; she had a beautiful style in written English; and third, she did not use these abilities to write in a vaunting way but subordinated her language to that of the writer she was translating. There are of course difficul ties in assessing Arturo Barea' s work, which relate to the fact that nearly all his books were first published in English, after being wri tten in Castilian. The translation by lisa of the trilogy is a far more fluent and polished work than the "original" or re-translation, which Losada published in Buenos Aires in 1951 (see Appendix 1). The easiest comparison, showing lisa's competence, lS between Chalmers-Mitchell's and her translation of La forja. For example, Chalmers-Mitchell, over 70 when he translated La forja, used slang out-of-date even at the time; whereas lisa often wisely leaves a term in the original (40). Her treatment of the voice of a slum child, is better: for example, she writes: "It was a nuisance that no ball came floating down ... " (41); rendered by Chalmers-Mitchell as: "I am cross because no ball has come down the river ... " (42). Nuisance, surely, is less refined than cross; and floating down more vivid. lisa catches the tone of a street urchin, who was yet sensitive. Nevertheless, the probable main reason for retranslating La forj a was to restore passages omi tted by Chalmers-Mi tchell, such as the descriptions of Arturo's adolescent sex games wi th Enriqueta; and to add other passages which Barea wanted to include, such as the description of the Cava baja at the start of Chapter 3. The other great innovation lisa made was to tell the whole book in the past tense rather than in the historic present: an unexplained change inasmuch as Barea retained the present in the 1951 Spanishlanguage edition. However, it is a change which reads well and in no way impairs Barea's re-creation of a childhood world. 272

An example of the third and most difficult virtue: fidelity to the original through the process of transformation to another language, is shown through the following passages: "~tonio, el ~antinero, ;rino despacito, echo una ojeada y se VOlV10 a su cantlna. Regreso con el cuchillo de cortar el jamon --C?gedla unos cuantos y sujetadla contra el borde -- dijo." ve7~te manos se apoderaron del cuerpo ahora limpio y metalico mantenlendole contra el reborde de cemento, y Antonio comenzo a cortar lonchas blancas, con una gota de sangre roja en el centro que al caer en el agua se disolvia lenta. Antonio me pago treinta pesetas." (43) lIsa's rendering: " Antonio, the canteen-keeper, came, looked and walked away to his canteen. He returned with a big knife for cutting ham. 'Catch hold of it, some of you, and put it here on the edge,' he said. Twenty hands held the body, now clean and shining, against the edge of the trough. Antonio began to cut it into slices, which slipped back into the water, each with a drop of red blood in the centre, which slowly dissolved. Antonio paid me thirty pesetas for it." (44) Every translation involves a set of choices. Some of lIsa's choices in the above extract illustrate the quality of her work: a) Wi th her sparse three verbs: "came, looked and walked away," she catches the figure of Antonio, silent but for one spare sentence and dominant in the scene. b) She is skilled in her use of colloquial phrasal verbs, both In narrative and speech. Examples here are "catch hold of" and "hold against". c) She changes the order of words in the phrase starting "y Antonio comenzo a cortar ... ", omits some words altogether ("blanca"), and introduces the term "slipped back." Thus she succeeds in the translator's aim of transmitting the image and feel of the original: in this case, of blood dripping into the water. There are some infelicities, especially in La ruta, her first full-length translation. One small example: '" ... The ki tchen yields me about ten pesetas . a day. AI:d there's always something to be got out of the clothlng, even lf I must leave the quartermaster-sergeant his portion. And my fo~~ is thrown in gratis: where sixteen eat, seventeen can be fed. (45)

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The original reads: "La cocina me da unas diez pese~as al dia: y siempre se saca algo de la ropa, aunque haya que de]arle su parte al suboficial. Y la comida me sale gratis; donde comen dieciseis, comen diecisiete." (46) "Yields" and "must" are both awkward in the mouth of the mess sergeant. The first is much more likely to be "gives," a more cornmon word. "Must" should be "have to". Thirdly, "thrown in" for "me sale" is incorrect: the mess sergeant is talking about robbing the people who eat in his canteen, whereas "thrown in" implies that the food is his right as part of his earnings. These points are quibbles. In general, lisa's are fine translations. They are not as brutal, as crude as the language of the originals. But Castilian is a harsher-sounding language in many ways; and Barea's prose some of the harshest written in that language. His ungrammatical use of some terms, which gives at times a colloquial, rough edge to the prose, is also something impossible to re-produce fully in translation. lisa went on to translate all of Arturo's subsequent work that was translated, as well as co-authoring with him the 1945 Fabian pamphlet and Unamuno. She wrote in the introduction to the 1959 Buenos Aires edition of this latter book: "Desde luego, nuestras largas discusiones sobre el tema tenian cierta influencia en el ensayo, pero solamente en su dialectica, no en su esencia." (47) lisa is being perhaps too modest about her role in this book. But their method of mutual discussion, of intensely living the composition of Arturo's books (they often wrote at the same table) would have greatly assisted her in finding le mot juste in her translations. She mentions in another context: "Recuerdo vi vidamente cuantas veces pedi a Arturo detalles descriptivos al traducir una frase s~ya que contenia alguna de esas alusiones, incomprensible para ml y por supuesto para tantos otros extranj eros." (48) But it was not only Arturo Barea's works which lisa translated. The trilogy was the first of about 20 full-length books which lisa was to translate from both Spanish and German into English OVer the following 25 years. The books are varied, and range from 274

commissions she may not have felt much sympathy with, such as Hortelano's Tonnen ta de verano, to books whose cul ture and/ or politics she shared. The translations from the Spanish are high-quality. Those from the German are often complex, such as schnitzler and Holderlln, and have a good reputation as accurate. Certainly in the English, they read well. Her most political translation, apart from Barea's books, was of the autobiography of the Civil War general, Valentin Gonzalez. His book Life and Death in Soviet Russia is a powerful (if not always reliable) testimony from an uneducated, but intelligent figure. Gonzalez was exiled in Moscow at the end of the Civil War. He rebels against Stalinist restrictions, is imprisoned, escapes, is caught and ends up working as a labourer building the Moscow underground in the late '40s, before finally fleeing the country. It is a book against Stalinism, written before 1956 made the first wave of anti-Stalinism f~om within the Communist Parties fashionable. But it is also a book written by a man who never renounces Socialism. lisa herself had no time for the Spenders and Koestlers who attacked the left alongside -:heir "revelations" of Stalin's crimes. Like Gonzalez, she v;as made of sterner stuff. The translation, and her sympathetic introduction, confirm indirectly what those who knew her report: that 13 years after the end of the Civil War, lisa still believed in the importance and centrality of the working-class in politics.

BROADCASTING As well as earning money throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s from translations, Ilsa worked as an interpreter. On various occasions there is evidence of her working at major Conferences. In 1949, for instance, she interpreted at both the "Free World Labour Conference" ln London and the "International Transport Workers' Conference" in Stuttgart. Six years later, she was working for 275

two weeks as an interpreter for an Austrian study group in London. ( 49) . Interpreting was an occasional but regular activity. Interpreting helped her to start broadcasting in English. This was a career she wanted, but one which never really took off. She pushed quite hard for a number of years in the 1950s, but the BBC archives show, through her letters and the BBC' s response, a number of problems. One drawback was her accent. One of her first broadcasts was an anecdotal piece on interpreting for "Womens' Hour" in 1951 (there is a list of lisa's broadcasts below). The producer afterwards questioned her sui tabili ty: apparently, when she was nervous, her accent tended to thicken (50). Probably more decisive in her failure to become an established broadcaster was her unreliability. In 1951 she had a proposal for a talk on Cela's Viaje a la Alcarria accepted by the BBC Third Programme. But she was then late in submitting the script due to "flu and neuritis," as she wrote in her effusively apologetic letter (51). However this was not something which happened just the once. It was repeated with other scripts; became a pattern of behaviour. llsa was clearly a person of tremendous nervous energy, who tended to overwork. Throughout the '50s she suffered from a constant stream of colds and 'flu; an echo of the bronchitis she had had in prison in the 1920s and of her prostration in Paris in 1938. The same nervousness that made her voice thicken and that caused her to speak at people, exacerbated these minor but debilitating illnesses. Around this time she began to suffer from Diabetes, too. lisa was not at all well, but she is unreasonable in expecting other people to make allowances for her failures to deliver. Thus her illness and nervousness became in other peoples' eyes unreliability, as she failed to meet deadlines. A third

factor mili tating against a successful broadcasting career was her verbosity, both written and verbal. She found it 276

hard to stop talking or to end a letter. One example was a letter she wrote to P.H.Newby, then a programme co-ordinator for the Third Programme, making a number of suggestions and expressing doubts about the programme's title. The points are quite justified in themselves, but long-winded and not tactfully put. It could not have entered her mind that she was intruding on Newby's province. After this programme, she tells Newby: "My accent and certain inflections made me squirm" (52). This second letter, full of apologies, instead of contributing to better relations, compounds the earlier errors of missing the deadline and telling Newby his job, by then over-reacting with self-doubt. In the same letter, she over-reaches wi th Newby by offering Arturo's s tory La s ti j era s for broadcas t . Newby rej ected the story. Ilsa was too pushy for England, and at the same time revealed too clearly her insecurities about her abilities. Her haughtiness, her bossiness too, are familiar traits of a person affected by nervousness and attempting by will-power to overcome it. The vicious circle is completed by her smoking, produced by and causing nerves, and illnesses. Nevertheless, during the 1950s, she did a number of broadcasts for both Womens' Hour and the Third Programme. They are varied: on interpreting and translation, on womens' changing status in Britain, on Heine and Schnitzler, on being foreign in England, on the continental use of food seasoning, and on pike fishing, about which she was surprisingly an expert and enthusiast. She would fish in Lord Faringdon' s lake at Buscot Park, the only leisure activity of lIsa recorded. She also made from time to time until 1958 a number of proposals for radio talks, which were not taken up by the BBC and rarely followed up by her. Her last actual broadcast appears to have been about Vienna for the Latin American Service in 1955.

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VIENNA.

Vienna: Legend and Reality was to be the title of the only book published solely in lIsa's name. Following a TLS article she wrote on Arthur Schnitzler in the mid-40s, George Weidenfeld the publisher, also an Austrian exile, who had met lIsa in August 1939 at the Monitoring Service and remained friendly, suggested she develop the article into a book on Vienna. She signed a contract with Weidenfeld, which was cancelled by mutual agreement in the mid-50s (53). Certainly In the mid-50s she was researching, but the book was still ten years away from completion and its eventual publication by Secker & Warburg in 1966 (54). Vienna is much finer than its 20-year gestation period and the author's problems in broadcasting might lead us to suppose. It is a complex and scholarly overview of her native city's development. Her express aim is well-summarised by lIsa herself: " (I am) in the very last stages of wri ting ... book called 'Mirage of Vienna,' an attempt at historical portrayal and at the same time evocation of 'Old' Vienna, but particularly the Old-New Vienna between 1870 and 1914 which launched the meretricious romantic myth of Viennese gaiety and glamour." (55) Amore personal motive for the book is expressed in its Preface: "In trying to find the roots of both positive and negative Viennese traits, in assessing our common heritage, I could not but uncover some of my own roots ... ln this sense, there is an element of autobiography in the book." (56)

Vienna is a cultural and social history, not a directly political one, and tantalisingly stops short in 1921. In other words, unlike Arturo Barea, lIsa does not wish to write about her own life. But she does embark on a similar Ii terary journey of self-discovery combined wi th historical and social investigation, albeit in a very different form. The style she chose was sober and serious, with occasional vivid turns of phrase, these latter often paralleling a sharp insight. She talks of Adler's "hollowed-out liberalism" (57), of another politician's arrival "just as a rattlesnake announces itself"

278

(58), of "the house without eyebrows" by Loos (59), to mention just three. The book shows her poli tical formation too, though there 1S nothing that would lead a reader to believe she had been a revolutionary militant for the two decades of her prime. But the poli tics emerge in her generally materialist approach to the subject matter. For example, she places Metternich in his social and historical position. She has no "great man" view of history (60) •

Her poli tical approach is also evident 1n the importance she ascribes to the working-class in history. The book is generally enriched by the skilful use of her own and her family's memories to illustrate her arguments: with regard to the working-class, she talks of childhood memory of workers' accent and speech and relates it to their exclusion from the ci ty' s archi tectural heritage, the property of the upper and middle classes (61). This use of memory provides a telling image of change when she mentions how a decayed palace became workers' tenements in the '20s

(62).

lisa is very conSClOUS too of the strength of popular history. She writes of the importance of commemoration marches in terms of "tenuous pipe-lines of tradition and the annual revival of memory ri tualistically repeated" (63). She also examines the formation of the workers' movement in Vienna and why it became social-democratic rather than communist; though the argument here (a thorny historical problem) is not convincing (64). She gives the prevalence of small workshops as against large factories as the reason for workers' favouring social democracy: however, this is too mechanical a view, and essentially the same reason as many historians give to explain the predominance, for a period, of the entirely different phenomenon of Anarchism in Catalonia. There are also echoes towards our main subject, Arturo Barea. In talking about the formation of Renaissance Vienna, lisa discusses the influence of the century of Spanish rule (65). (The Spanish dynasty was of course called "the Austrias") . With discipline she 279

never steps outside the structure and brief of her book to make direct comparisons. But it is clear that when she talks of the "damage" done by the Counter-Reformation, she is continuing a discussion about the nature of Spanish absolutism (66) . Secondly, Franco is a discernible shadow in the background of the discussion of Metternich (67). the most rigorous scholarly standards, Vienna might be considered a hotch-potch. Historians should not write about their own family, perhaps; nor overemphasise their own interests at the expense of a more rounded view. But the book works; it is coherent. It spans different genres in what is an effective and creative way: based on a dialectical view of history, it is more a cultural and social account of a city's development, though one which does not avoid politics.

By

Vienna reveals the author as critical, intellectual, highly educated, well-informed, and driven by political and social commitment. One may assume it represented a singular personal triumph too, as with Vienna she overcame the disorganisation of her practical and mental life in Britain.

Like Arturo Barea's, Ilsa Pollak's life had turned over in the middle. In the second phase of his life, Arturo was able to find his place and a meaning for himself with his writing. It was harder for Ilsa, whose whole adult life up to 1938 had been dedicated to revolutionary poli tics. Weidenfeld mentioned she was subject to conspiracy theories; and added that the theories may have had basis (68). England was an inhospitable place for a clever, bossy foreign woman of her wide culture and left-wing views. She would never, for example, go to the pub with Arturo, who was perfectly happy drinking and chatting at whatever level: lisa is unimaginable fitting into the "Wellington" at Faringdon! Inevitably, and against her wish, she became known as Mrs Arturo Barea (69). As we have chronicled, she was often ill, she was often incompetent in dealing with her employers (though never less than a good organiser in her work in Spain or at the Monitoring Service). These facts could be seen as traits of a highly-strung bohemian; but can better be understood, I believe, 280

as reactions against an often hostile environment. In this light, Vienna is a triumph of achievement and organisation, even though it took her twenty years.

PERSONAL LIFE IN BRITAIN. From 1938 until Arturo's death, lIsa lived in the same places as her husband (her advance move to Caversham in 1943 and Arturo's sojourn at Pennsylvania in 1952 excepted). These places have been documented in Chapter 7. It is implied above she was not happy. But this is a Vlew that needs to be nuanced. There are no recorded arguments between her and Arturo. Most early witnesses describe them as being particularly happy together. Gellhorn (1937) saw them as two physically unprepossessing outsiders who fitted well together: he was "very silent and dreamy"; she "bossy and Germanic (!)" (70). Weidenfeld said of the 1940s: "they had a strong physical bond" (71). Younger Labour Party colleagues of lIsa's describe them as a happy couple. Joan Gili, who knew both lisa and Arturo well and visited them at Middle Lodge, said: "They were very happy there ... They complemented each other beautifully. She was the brilliant intellectual, and he was the intuitive eye of say 'I am a camera' of Christopher Isherwood." (72) Gili's view leads into the opinion of Roland Gant that: "Lorca and later work were helped by and fil tered through lisa's Central European intellectualism. Her part in putting him on the (English) literary map and social scene was very important." (73) lisa and Arturo had a close emotional and working relationship; were complementary personalities in many ways. They were, according to most sources, happy together, at least until the 1950s. But none of this should obscure her frequent patent dissatisfaction and unease with people and life in England. The grumpy, often bad-tempered Arturo was liked by most people who knew him. But lIsa was not so easy to get on with: she was prickly and easily took offence. In everything she did she was patently present, an intense and intelligent figure. She was 281

always respected, but not so often liked. One young friend of lisa's from Faringdon related a telling anecdote: "lisa was quite capable of rifling through your bag without a 'by-your-~eave' to scrounge a cigarette, but you would never dream of dOlng the same to her." (74) What was lisa's physical appearance like? According to Martha Gellhorn, she was "short and rotund" (75). Lord Weidenfeld confirms she was "small, plump," and adds that she was "ungainly and shapeless, with a shining forehead and a lot of hair" (76). Vladimir Rubinstein describes her as "a little pudding ... five feet tall" (77). lIsa was not a conventionally attractive woman. But of course, beauty is subjective. And Arturo Barea tells us of her "ojos verde-gris" and how her severe face could dissolve into happiness with her smile and "boca deliciosa" (78). Dress was not important to her. When Weidenfeld met her at the Monitoring Service in August 1939, she was wearing tennis shoes and a floppy sweater. Her copious hair, greying through her years in England, was roughly pulled back behind her head, with chunks often sticking out loose. In Madrid she wore an old raincoat. lisa was active in the lively Faringdon Labour Party of the late '40s and '50s. She was on the Bevanite wing of the Party (79). Bri tish social-democracy was tamer by far than the pre-war Austrian variant, but lIsa participated fully in the arguments of the day. On occasion she dined at Buscot House, and it is easy to imagine her haranguing right-wing Labour luminaries such as Susan Lawrence and their Fabian host Lord Faringdon. She would talk non-stop about politics in general, and Spain in particular. Arturo's funeral was private. His ashes were scattered at Middle Lodge. Late in 1958, lisa moved to Lansdowne Terrace in West London. She seems never to have returned to Faringdon, where she had lived for 11 years. She did not to keep up with many people from the past, though she maintained contact with Olive Renier and Margaret Rink. She continued to promote Arturo's work, as she had done since he first began to write. She got La lecci6n accepted for the Home Service under the ti tIe Grandmother's Lesson, and the same story, ti tied Big Granny, published in 282

Argosy in 1964. More substantially, she arranged, along with Roland Gant, for the trilogy to be published in paper-back for the first time in 1958. She also wrote the prefaces for Unamuno, published in a re-translation to Spanish from her English version in Buenos Aires in 1959, and El centro de la pista, for which she also selected the stories, published in Madrid in 1960. In 1958 lisa got a job as General Editor of Four-Square Books' paperback world classics. In 1962, she moved to the New English Library, still in London, as edi tor of their Modern Classics series. In 1968, when she retired, she returned to Vienna, which she had left in 1934. Money was not easy. She had sub-let her London flat and had problems with the rent. For long periods she was ill with high temperatures and kidney problems, complications associated with Diabetes, yet had to keep working at translations and articles. It was not her first return to Vienna: that had been in 1955, when she visited for two months, but it was her final move. She died there in the first days of January 1972, according to one source while working on her autobiography (80). **************

283

ILSA BAREA'S BROADCASTS FOR THE B.B.C. All in English unless otherwise stated. 9.9.41. 'Spaniards in Hitler's army,' Pacific edition of 'Radio Newsreel' . 24.6.51. 'A journey in Castile' (On Cela's Viaje a la Alcarria). Late 1951? 'Interpreting,' Women's Hour. 8/1/52. 'Techniques of translation,' Third Programme. Starting 12/11/53. Series of 6 discussions with three others on 'The art of translation,' Latin American Service. In Spanish. 10/12/53. 'Science of interpreting, ' Austrian Service. In German. 23/12/53. 'Women's changing status in Britain,' Latin American Service. In Spanish. 3/2/54. 'Padre Isla and the Cartas familiares.' 29/4/54. 'Translation and misinterpretation'. On Schnitzler and Heine. 10/12/54. 'Salt on the table,' Women's Hour. 21/12/54. 'Foreigners in England.' Discussion with Edward Atiyah and Count Benkendorff. 14/3/55. 'The secret of the pike,' Women's Hour. 22/8/55. 'Vienna,' Third Programme. August or September, 1955. Same 'Vienna, ' Latin American Service. In Spanish. Aug/Sept 1955. 'The young worker of today -- a new type,' Third Programme. *************** ILSA'S PUBLICATIONS. 'Viennese Mirage,' TLS, 1945. On Schnitzler's prose. SPAIN in the post-war world, Arturo Barea) . Unamuno,

(Bowes

&

Fabian pamphlet 97,

Bowes, Cambridge 1952)

(with

(with Arturo Barea) .

Vienna, legend and reali ty 7 (,Secker & Warburg, Reprinted in paperback by Plmllco in 1992.

284

1945

London 1966).

Introduction to El Campesino's Life and Death ~n Soviet Russia. (1952) Foreword to translation of Cervantes by S.J.Arbo. 1955. Article on Vienna for Harper's Bazaar, late 1955. Introduction to Unamuno, (Buenos Aires 1959). This introduction was new for the Spanish-language edition. Introduction to El centro de la pista,

(Madrid 1960) .

************** ILSA's TRANSLATIONS. Books.

1943 1944 1944 1946 1951

The Track. Barea. The Clash. Barea. Lorca. Barea. The Forge. Barea The Broken Root. Barea.

1952 Life and death in Soviet Russia. Valentin Gonzalez. 1955 Cervantes: Adventurer, Idealist and Destiny's fool. Sebastian Juan Arbo. (Thames and Hudson.) 1955 Three husbands hoaxed (Los tres maridos burlados). G.Tellez (Tirso de Molina) . c.1956 Poems of Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, with Vernon Watkins. 1957 Small town cathedral. ?? 1958 The triumphant heretic (Der siegreche ketzer). E.Halperin. 1959 In the darkness of my fear (Cuando voy a morir). Ricardo Fernandez de la Requera Ugarte. 1961 The horns of fear (Los clarines del miedo) . Angel M.de Lera. 1962 Summer storm (Tormenta de verano). Juan Garcia Hortelano. 1964 Reach for the ground (Cuerpo a tierra). Ricardo Fernandez de la Requera Ugarte. 1965 Tapies 1954-1964. Alejandro Cirici Pellicer. 1970 Russia and the Russians. ?? Ilsa Barea also edited the reprint (undated) of The Dark Wedding, originally translated by Eleanor Clark and published by Grey Walls Press in 1948. It is to be assumed too, from the fact that she translated Barea's books and also internal stylistic evidence, that llsa translated to' English all Arturo Barea's essays, articles and stories. ****************************

285

NOTES. 1. Weeden, Margaret, 'Ilsa Barea. Some notes on her life.' (Unpublished, October 1992). I~se had a brother Willy, 2 or 3 years younger than her, and a slster Lotte 5 years younger. Both married Danes. 2. ~lsa's ,mother's brother had a position of authority under the Nazls, whlch enabled Ilsa's parents to leave Vienna in 1939. 3. Letter from el Duque de Primo de Rivera, Spanish Ambassador in London, 6/6/56 (4850-3, Archive of the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Madrid). 4. Barea, Ilsa, Vienna,

(London 1966), p.86.

5. Weeden, Margaret, 'Ilsa Barea, some notes ... ' art.cit .. 6. FR, p. 698 7. Vienna, p.6 8. FR, p.645 9. Seale, Patrick and McConville, Maureen, Philby, the long road to Moscow (London 1978), p.83. Margaret Weeden recalls Ilsa saying that the imprisonment in Hungary was for 3 months in 1920 (not 1925) and that she shared a cell with a murderess who taught her tatting. ('Ilsa Barea,' art. ci t. ) 10. Seale & McConville, Philby ... op.cit.; and interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90. 11. FR, p. 7 66 12. Seale & McConville, 24/1/90.

op.cit.; letter from Stephen Spender,

13. Vienna, p.89 14. FR, p. 766 15. FR, pp.744-745 16. Letter from Isabel de Madariaga, 8/3/92: "She [Ilsa] wa~ the very typical Middle European p,arty-me~~r, pro';,d of he~ frlends among senior Russian generals In the clvll war. (Madarlaga adds that she dl'd not like either of the Bareas). Also: Interview wi th Gladys Langham, Margaret and Bill Carter, 14/11/89. 17. Letter from Olive Renier, 6 August 1992. 18. FR. p.645 19. FR, p.644

286

20. See Chapters 1 and 6 for further information on Arturo and lIsa's meeting and their later life together. 21. FR, p.646 22. Ayala, Francisco, Recuerdos y Olvidos,

(Madrid 1988) .

23. She was known as "I~sa de ~a Telef6nica" to distinguish her from another Ilsa. The ]ournallsts sending out their dispatches had to bring them first to her in Room 402. Sefton Delmer Ernest Hemingway (see his biography by Carlos Baker, p. 374),' Martha Gellhorn and Arturo Barea all mention her dynamism capacity for work and influence. ' 24. Telephone interview with Martha Gellhorn, 16/8/90. 25. Interview with Peter Heller, July 6, 1992. 26. Interview with Olive Renier, July 6, 1992. 27. Delmer, Sefton, Trail Sinister, (London 1961). 28. Interview with Martha Gellhorn, 16/8/90. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Interview with Professor Fernandez Gutierrez, 16/3/90.

Tarragona,

32. FR 782/3. 33. Renier

&

Rubinstein, Assigned to listen,

34. Letter from Ilsa Barea 'lIsa Barea ... ' art.cit ..

(WAC,

(BBC 1987), p.20.

16/5/51); Weeden, Margaret,

35. Weeden, Margaret, 'lIsa Barea ... ' art.cit .. 36. Several letters of lIsa are in the Arturo Barea files at the BBe's Written Archives Centre (WAC) as well as in the one file under her own name. 37. Letter from lIsa Barea (WAC 25/7/39). 38. lIsa often dictated these translations to Margaret.Wee~en when they got home after a 4 to midnight s~ift at ,the Monltorlng Service (Weeden, Margaret, 'lIsa Barea ... art.c~t.). 39. Interview with Olive Renier, 6/7/92. R.Martinez Nadal called lIsa, Olive Renier and Margaret Weed~n La Santa Trinidad, because of the closeness of t~elr collaboration on Arturo Barea's work (Letter to me from Martlnez Nadal, 14/6/93).

40. E.g. 'Caramba' in The Track, p.193.

287

41. The Forge,

(London 1946) , p.23

42. The Forge,

(London 1941) , P .15

43. FR, p.383 44. The Track, pp.152-3 45. The Track, p.71 46. FR, p.299 47. Unamuno (Buenos Ai res 1959), p.8 48. El centro de la pista,

(Badajoz 1988), Prefacio, pp.43-44.

49. These references to her interpreting work occur in letters held in the WAC. 50. Letter from Ilsa Barea (WAC 11/2/54) . 51. Letter from Ilsa Barea (WAC 2/6/51) . 52. Letter from Ilsa Barea to P.R.Newby (WAC 26/6/51) . 53. Interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90. 54. Letters from Ilsa Barea to Anna Kallin 14/2/55) . 55. WAC 11/2/55. 56. Vienna, p .14 57. Ibid. p.252 58. Ibid. p.287 59. Ibid. p.258 60. Ibid. P .189 61. Ibid. p.109 62. Ibid. p.91 63. Ibid. p.201 64. Ibid. p.334 65. Ibid. pp.44-45 ff. 66. Ibid. p.52 67 . Ibid. p.189 68. Interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90.

288

(WAC 11/2/55 and

69. Letter from Ilsa Barea (WAC 15/5/51). 70. Interview with Martha Gellhorn, 16/8/90. 71. Interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90. 72.-Letter to me from Joan Gili, 6/3/90. 73. Letter to me from Roland Gant, 7/3/90. 74. Interview with Margaret Carter, 14/11/89. 75. Interview with Martha Gellhorn, 16/8/90. 76. Interview with Lord Weidenfeld, 24/9/90. 77. Interview with Vladimir Rubinstein, 6 July 1992. 78. FR, pp.652 & 646 79. Letter from Bill Carter, February 1990. 80. The ti tle page of the Pimlico (1992) edi tion of Vienna comments that she died while working on her Autobiography.

289

APPENDIX 4.

LA SENORA SMITH.

Juan de Castilla.

This was originally written for broadcast on 18 th March, 1946. It is one of the 80 typescripts of Arturo Barea's BBC broadcasts kept in the Written Archives Centre of the BBC at Caversham. It is a good example of Barea' s radio scripts for several reasons. Its relaxed and intimate (using 'os') style is typical of his broadcasts. It gives some interesting details of Barea's life in the small Hertfordshire village of Puckeridge in 1939. It suffers, like many of Barea's radio pieces, from defects of sentimentalism and over-praise of the English -- the war-time propaganda persisting after the end of the war. The piece is a good example of how Barea links personal contact, on the local scale, to the overall politics of the country, particularly in the climactic passage when, while London burns, the two couples sit in the peace of friendship. Despite its sentimentalism and English chauvinism, it succeeds in being convincingly sincere and moving. In terms of composition, it is worth noting the padding Barea could give to a piece in order to reach the requisite 14 and a half minutes: small tangents in the narrative, yet which also serve to give breadth to the contents. This is very much the rambling, yet controlled, style which lIsa commented on in the introduction to El centro de la pista: " ... era un narrador nato; yo solia tomarle el pelo por sus infulas de narrador de zoco marroqui. Disfrutaba contando historietas de su vida, cuaj adas de detalles vistos, experimentados e imaginados ... muchos de los cuentos reunidos en este libro nacieron de alguna anecdota que me habia contado una noche delante de las brasas de una chimenea inglesa." Barea is sometimes careless in his phrasing: for example, "ambos eran graduados de las Uni versidades de Cambridge y Oxford," which leaves unclear whether both had gone to both places or one to each; "no fueron" instead of "no fue" ; "se fue desenvolviendose"; "seguramente" repeated, etc .. These errors 290

were a consequence of the need to produce a piece every week and of his ability to type these scripts almost straight out, with little or no correction. Oddities in his Spanish are evident, such as "en las noches" or "una pieza de teatro", where there is English influence. Incidentally, Barea used a typewriter without accents: so any error in accentuation is mine. Imagine doing one of these a week for 800 weeks! Senora Smith demonstrates Barea's mastery of this minor literary skill of spoken, anecdotical journalism. ************** La senora Smith. La senora Smith se ha muerto. Esta es una noticia que yo entiendo os tiene tan sin cuidado como si el senor Perez 0 G6mez de vuestra ciudad 0 vuestro pueblecito se hubiera muerto. Pero para mi tiene mucha importancia, tanta que aspir~ a que para vosotros tambien la tenga. Se llamaba asi realmente. No es un nombre que invento para ocultar otra persona. Se llamaba asi: Smith, a secas. es decir, Perez a secas. Era la esposa de un Perez 0 si 10 preferis de un Smith, por que los Smith son los Perez de Inglaterra. Su marido era y es aun un labrador pendiente de las nubes del cielo y de los gusanos de la tierra. Sembrar y esperar; recolectar y esperar; arar y volver a sembrar. Entre estos ciclos mirar a la tierra. Los enemigos del labrador son ante todo dos: el tiempo y las pestes del campo. Pero no creais que el matrimonio era un matrimonio de labradores rudos e incultos, analfabetos y supersticiosos. No. ambos habian tenido sus estudios; ambos eran graduados de las Universidades de Cambridge y Oxford. Sus estudios no les habian hecho odiar a la tierra como a muchos les hacen los libros de texto, ni renegar que sus antepasados fueran destripaterrones. Al contrario: terminaron sus estudios y volvieron a la tierra. Una finca inmensa con rebanos de ovejas y de vacas, con campos de trigo y de cebada -- a veces con cacerias de liebres; -- todo en un rinconci to de Inglaterra, a cincuenta kilometros de

291

Londres. Una vez dos veces por semana el senor 0 la senora Smith cogian su autom6vil y se iban a Londres; de compras 0 de farra. Una farra decente, de matrimonio rico y feliz. Cuando yo los conoci no eran ya j6venes, sino en el borde de la madurez y la antesala de la vejez. Esa hora en que se ven las cosas serenamente y se empieza a pensar que se tiene uno que morir y que es necesario morir decentemente 0 si 10 preferis vivir decentemente, para que el morir no sea indecente. Ahora os contare como los conoci yo: Un dia de este mes de marzo hace exactamente siete anos, ml mujer y yo llegabamos a la costa inglesa, con 10 puesto y con un maletin de mano, hogar perdido, patria perdida, para entregarnos en manos de la buena voluntad de los hombres de buena voluntad. Un amigo nos habia ofrecido su casa hasta que nos orientaramos en este para nosotros pais extrano; un techo y las tres comidas de cada dia; mas no podia hacer porque no era hombre rico, sino un hombre que cada dia habia de coger su bicicleta, pedalear a la estaci6n y quemarse las cejas en una oficina londinense hasta la caida de la tarde que regresaba a casa fatigado de su trabajo. Y esta clase de hombres, ya sabeis que no tienen capital ni para criados, ni para excesos. Su mujer, lavaba y fregaba y su jubilo era una botella de cerveza el domingo con el asado de carnero y dos 0 tres escapadas en el ano a londres a ver una pieza de teatro. Vivimos con ellos tres meses hasta que ganamos nuestras primeras cinco libras. No podiamos segUlr, decentemente, siendo una carga para ellos y con estas cinco libras nos fuimos mi muj er y yo al pueblecito mas inmediato y alquilamos una casita diminuta donde vivir los dos, como dios quisiera dejarnos vivir. Aun no habia guerra y cinco libras era un mont6n de dinero que hoy no es mas que un punadi to. Pero era poco. Nuestra casa estaba vacia a pesar de ser tan chiquitita. Una cama, una mesa, dos sillas y media docena de pucheros; para corner, pan y mantequilla untada. Una manana se present6 en nuestra casa la senora Smith: -- Soy la senora Smith, dijo. Tanto gusto, dij imos nosotros, pensando para nuestros adentros: Gquien sera esta senora Smith? Nos 10 debi6 conocer en la cara, porque se sonri6 levemente y dijo: Bien, yo soy, Gcomo explicarselo? algo asi como la 292

senora del pueblo. Me he enterado que estaban Ustedes aqui y que estan pasando apuros. No vengo a ofrecerles una limosna, Dios me libre, vengo a ponerme a su disposici6n. ni les voy a dejar una libra a escondidas sobre la mesa, ni les voy a ofrecer comida. Pero, lquieren Ustedes venir a casa a tomar el te conmigo manana? Charlamos largo rato en frances, aun no hablaba yo ingles para una conversaci6n seria. No. Ella no tenia exactamente nuestras ideas politicas. Era enemiga de violencias, de revoluciones, de guerras. No comprendia, no acababa de comprender que los hombres se apasionaran por estas cosas. Tenia su marido, sus hijos, su casa; la vida era dulce, amable, GPorque pelearse? Ah, que la senora Smi th fue nuestro apoyo en aquellos primeros meses de destierro nuestro en esta Inglaterra. Un apoyo y una ayuda discretos y senoriales. Hasta creo -- ella sabia un poquito de espanol -- que la traducci6n que me encarg6 de unos viejos cuentos de Dickens, los Cuentos de Navidad, no fueron mas que el pretexto para que ganaramos unas cuantas libras de las que tan escasos andabamos. Con el tacto, no s610 de no pagarnos mas de 10 debido, sino hasta de criticar el trabajo hecho. Venia por casa y olisqueaba en la COClna. Parecia interesarse mucho por los guisos espanoles. En realidad se interesaba si teniamos bastante que comer, porque su envio de un conej 0 0 una liebre 0 un pato sal vaj e coincidia siempre con nuestras escaseces. Espulg6 su biblioteca y nos mand6 un mont6n de libros "que a ella no la interesaban". Un mont6n de libros invaluables. lDe su biblioteca? Sospecho que muchos de ellos fueron comprados especialmente para nosotros en las tiendas de libros viejos de Londres. Entre ellos vino Ruben Dario y Cervantes. Poco a poco nuestra vida personal se fue desenvolviendose. Trabajabamos y comenzabamos a ganar dinero bastante para vivir modestamente, muy modestamente. La senora Smith cambi6 de tacticas: cuando nos vi6 con nuestra primera ropa decente, nos invit6 a sus reuniones. Ya no nos enviaba un conejo 0 una liebre para nuestra despensa, sino un ramo de flores 0 una fuente de fresas. Discutiamos literatura y politica en los crepusculos y a veces jugabamos un partido de tennis, despacito, porque todos 293

ya eramos maduros y no podiamos sofocarnos en el juego rabioso de los muchachos. Esta fue la historia de unos cortos meses, los meses que hay desde marzo hasta septiembre en que comenz6 la guerra; y la guerra nos separ6: la guerra me mand6 a mi a 10 que vosotros habeis conocido como mi pueblecito a traves de mis charlas, a ella, la mand6 a Londres a hacerse cargo de una ambulancia que en las noches iba a traves de las calles de 10ndres recogiendo muertos y heridos por las bombas de los aviones. Pero la amistad no se destruy6. Nos escribiamos a veces largas cart as contando nuestras impresiones. De tiempo en tiempo, la senora Smith se escapaba de sus bombardeos y sus heridos y venia al pueblecito a descansar unos dias en nuestra casa. En Navidad nos enviabamos un regalo. Seguiamos sin coincidir en opiniones poli ticas y discutiamos. Sobre nuestras discusiones presidian los jarros de miel y de mermelada que habia traido para nosotros de su jardin. Esta Navidad, nos mand6 su regalo de Pascuas, con una carta triste: De su hijo mayor, perdido en uno de los puestos inc6gnitos de Asia no se sabia nada aun y ya habia que dar las esperanzas por perdidas. Ella tenia un cancer que la roia las entranas y no viviria mucho. 10 decia ella, en estas palabras que os copio: "No cree que viva mucho. En fin, los chicos estan criados y s610 quisiera tener la certidumbre de si Charlie esta vivo 0 no. Fuera de esto cree que he cumplido mi papel en este mundo. En cuanto a vosotros, tu y tu mujer, quiero que sepais cuanto placer me habeis proporcionado. Yo, como todos, creia que los hombres son diferentes en cada pais y en cada raza. Cuando vinisteis al pueblo, fuisteis la curiosidad, la novedad. Despues habeis sido los amigos, amigos, como no he logrado tenerlos entre muchos de mis viejos amigos ingleses. Me he convencido que el amor no tiene fronteras. Me rio aun cuando yo pensaba que todos los espanoles eran toreros Y tu te asustaste un dia de las vacas en nuestros campos." Su marido me ha escrito esta semana que ha terminado una carta triste: "La pobre Concha se muri6 sin una queja. Dios la tenga en paz."

294

Por las salitreras de Chile yo tengo un desconocido amlgo que dos veces ya me ha escrito cartas amargas. El no cree en amistades, no cree en los hombres, casi creo que no cree en Dios. En una de sus cartas me preguntaba por que estaba yo tan entusiasmado con los ingleses. GQue era 10 que yo habia encontrado en Inglaterra que me hacia alabarla cada vez? "Porque -- decia en una de sus cartas que tengo ante la vista -- yo no creo que esas cosas pueden escribirse ni decirse como Usted las dice si no son verdad, si no se sienten." Yo Ie ofrezco esta historia a mi amigo chileno; yo Ie juro que esta historia es cierta, tan cierta como simple y sin importancia. No tiene "punta" como decimos los madrilenos; no tiene nada dentro. Es una historia real que no tiene mas que una ensenanza: perdida patria y hacienda, salvado el pellejo por milagro, en tierra extrana, entre gentes extranas, yo he visto florecer entre mis manos la flor delicada de la amistad. Convertirse en una planta esplendida y florecer cada ano, durante los seis anos de odio de la humanidad, entre la senora Smith y yo. Dos seres que habiamos nacido en diferentes paises, en diferentes costumbres, en diferentes escalas sociales, con un idioma diferente. Mi muj er y yo, su marido y ella, hemos charlado a veces en esas horas del crepusculo en que se vuelve uno intima y no se quieren encender las luces para no romper el encanto de la intimidad y la noche cae y Ie envuelve a uno en sombras contandose secretos en voz bajita para no despertar el misterio de la vida y de la muerte que siempre escucha. A veces sobre nuestras palabras calladas habia el resplandor rojo de los incendios en el horizonte que retardaban la noche y habia las explosiones que estremecian la tierra y hacian vibrar las paredes de nuestra salita. Cuando alguien, en los dias futuros que yo pueda vivir me pregunte: GQue es 10 que yo he amado en Inglaterra? no sabre explicarlo seguramente, pero seguramente comenzare a contar: En Inglaterra, yo conoci a una senora Smith, que Dios tenga en su Gloria. Y les contare esta historia. Y Sl, no me en t'len d en..... Bl' en , si no me entienden, me callare y les mirare con lastima. ******************** 295

APPENDIX 5.

THE CORDOBA TAPE. This is a transcript of part of a radio interview with Arturo Barea on May 6th , 7th or 8th , 1956 in C6rdoba, Argentina.

Interlocutor: Don Arturo, Gel seud6nimo Juan de Castilla tiene algo que ver con nuestro Juan Pueblo? GVerdaderamente es un simbolo espiritual de nuestro Juan Pueblo? Barea: Bien, a mi no me ha gustado nunca hablar con mi nombre propio. [Adopte] el seud6nimo de La voz de Madrid [y ahora el] de Juan de Castilla, que me parecia ya simbolo de todo el pueblo y no el simbolo de una ciudad. Interlocutor: Perfectamente, Don Arturo. escribiera La forja?

GQue Ie impuls6 que

Barea: La raz6n podria decir que era personal. El choque de la Guerra Civil de Espana, el destino en Francia, expulsado por un lado y por el otro, me hizo echarme a la busca de cuales eran las razones porque los espanoles estabamos asi. Y buscando, buscando, tuve que dar ... la busqueda a 10 mas lejano, realmente al mismo hecho de nacer y seguir desde alIi la raz6n de porque un espanol habia sido baqueteado de tal manera como tantos millones.

Interlocutor: Muy bien, Don Arturo. Esta pregunta puede parecer parad6jica, pero quizas es complementaria de la anterior. GS u vocaci6n de escritor naci6 con La forja?

Barea: No. Mi vocaci6n de escritor naci6 alIa cuando tenia 7 anos. Ya me daba entonces por escribir cuentecitos y versitos cuando estaba en el colegio. Teniamos alIa un peri6dico pequenin que se llamaba Madrilenitos y creo que alIi estan mis primeras, no digo producciones, mis primeras incursiones en el campo de la literatura. 296

Interlocutor: Bien, Don Arturo, muy grato ese recuerdo de la ninez. Y ahora una pregunta al margen de esas poesias, que Vd escribia, Geran dedicadas a alguna jovencita, tambien a alguna madrilenita de 7 anos? Barea: No, no. Eran dedicadas en general a la Santisima Virgen. Interlocutor: Bien, perfectamente, Don Arturo. GPuede decirnos el porque de su recorrido por America y en particular a Argentina? que es 10 que nos atane. Barea: Bien, la razon de esto es simplemente que yo iba hablando ya 16 anos para los paises latinoamericanos y me habia hartado de hablar a alguien que no conocia de ninguna manera. Y la BBC de Londres al fin se decidio a gastarse unas cuantas libras en que viniera a conocer a estos pueblos ya que podria hablar mejor por la radio. No se si 10 voy a conseguir, pero por 10 menos hablare a alguien a que conozco. Interlocutor: Ya 10 ha conseguido y ampliamente, Don Arturo ... GPuede ampliarnos Vd. los datos sobre su entrada en la emisora britanica? Barea: Bien, esto fue caSl una casualidad. Cuando acab6 la guerra, alguien que ya me conocia de Madrid y de las actuaciones mias por radio en Madrid, me propuso que me incorporara al servicio de habla espanola en la BBC. Yo hice una charlita y el jefe de servicio de entonces me probo la voz y dijo, bien, esta bien, por 10 menos 10 utilizaremos para 3 0 4 charlas porque no creo que va Vd. poder hacer mas. Bien, entre en la BBC y seguia haciendo mas y mas. Todavia no se ha muerto el que me vaticin6 el fracaso. Interlocutor: Y Vd. ha hecho centenares de 3

0

4 comentarios.

Barea: Anda ya, por cerca de las 800. Interlocutor: Perfectamente bien. Sigamos por el tema. Su primer choque 0 su primer incidente agradable en tierra inglesa. 297

Barea: Bueno, mi primer choque en tierra ingles, es de decir la verdad, es un choque un poco relacionado con el Vlno. Habia un hombre muy simple, era el dueno de una taberna. No es una tabernita de esas de mi pueblo que te hablo. Un dia fui alIi para beber una cerveza y el hombre me dijo: "como se que a Vds. los espanoles les gusta mucho el vino, Ie doy un regalo y he comprado una botella de jerez para Vd .. Y efectivamente produjo una botella que decia Jerez con letras muy grandes, bueno, Sherry, como dicen en ingles alIi. Me llen6 tambien un vasa muy grande, casi si fuera un vase de cerveza. Y yo tome el vaso, probe el vino y con mucho cuidado, porque entonces yo destrozaba el ingles mucho mas que 10 destrozo ahora, dije "This is not Sherry". Es decir, Ie conteste una groseria, Ie dij e en su propia cara, "esto no es el j erez". Inmediatamente temi que ibamos a romper la amistad para siempre, pero el hombre Ie cay6 en gracia y dijo "No, esto es Sherry, es el jerez que hacemos aqui nosotros".

Interlocutor: Entonces los dos tenian raz6n. Barea: Ademas era malo, eh. Interlocutor: Don Arturo, Gcomo siente la patria siendo lejos de ella?

Barea: Bien, esto ya es muy serio. La patria se siente como un dolor agudo. Verdaderamente como un dolor agudo al que no llego aun a acostumbrarme. [varias preguntas] · h0 Barea: ... ya se h e d lC

venia a C6rdoba con una emoci6n muy

intensa por diferentes razones acumuladas. La raz6n de que C6rdoba naturalmente me recuerda a la C6rdoba de Espana, donde tengo familia, de donde es mi hermana y donde me han pasado algunas cositas tambien que no es el momenta de contar ahora. ***********************

298

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

1. Biographical articles about Arturo Barea. 2. Critical articles about Arturo Barea. 3. Books containing in-depth studies of Arturo Barea. 4. General background books and articles. 5. Works of fiction.

1. Biographical articles about Barea. Barea, lisa, Introduction to: Unamuno, 1959) .

(Editorial Sur, Buenos Aires

Chalmers-Mitchell, Sir Peter, Introduction to: The Forge, Faber, London 1941) . Eaude, Michael, 'Arturo Barea, Exile wi thout resentment,' Magazine, London, April/May 1994. Grant, Helen, Introduction to: Poynter, London 1972) .

The Forging of a Rebel,

(Faber & London (Davis-

Opoczenski, Ginger, 'Americans' Activity astonishes Spaniard,' The Daily Collegian, Pennsylvania State College, 28/2/52. Renier, Olive, Before the Bonfire, 100-101.

(Drinkwater, London 1984), pp.

Weeden, Margaret, 'Arturo Barea: the Spaniard who came to England,' script for Australian Broadcasting Commission, Canberra 27/4/1958. Weeden, Margaret, 'Arturo Barea: an appreciation,' Meanjin Review, Vol. XV111, April 1959. Weeden, Margaret, 'The Arturo Barea story: the forging of a rebel, ' En Australia y en Nueva Zelanda, Vol. lV, No.9, (Spanish Embassy, Canberra, October 1991). Weeden, Margaret, , lisa Barea. (Unpublished, October 1992) .

299

Some

notes

on

her

1 i fe. '

2. Critical articles about Barea. Anon., 'Varied lives,' review of Supplement (TLS), London 12/7/41.

The

Forge,

Times

Literary

Anon., 'The track,' TLS, London 14/8/43. Anon., 'Lorca,' TLS, London 8/4/44. Anon., 'Civil War,' review of The Clash, TLS, London 23/3/46. Anon., 'Broken root,' TLS, London 11/5/51. Anon., 'In permanent opposition,' review of Unamuno, 5/12/52.

TLS, London

Anon, 'Arturo Barea,' obituary in The Manchester Guardian, 28/12/57. Bates, Ralph,

'Arturo Barea,' The Nation, New York, 19/7/47.

Benedetti, Mario, 'El testimonio de Arturo Barea,' Numero, (Montevideo 1951), pp. 374-381.

I I I,

Brenan, Gerald, 'An honest man,' New York Review of Books, New York, March 1975, pp. 3-4. Review of The forging of a rebel. Castellet, Jose Maria, 'En la muerte de Arturo Barea, novelista espafiol,' Papeles de Son Armadans, (Madrid 1958), Vol. VIII, No. XXII, pp. 101-106. Devlin, John, 'Arturo Barea and Jose Maria Gironella--Two interpreters of the Spanish labyrinth,' Hispania, XLI, (1958), pp. 143-148. Domingo, Jose, 'La obra autobiografica de Arturo Barea,' in De la postguerra a nuestros dias, (Nueva Coleccion Labor, Barcelona 1973) . Eaude, Michael,

'El exilio fecundo,' El Mundo, Madrid 6/11/93.

Gili, Joan, 'The eye of realism,' obituary of Arturo Barea in The Times, London 28/12/57. Gimenez-Frontin, Jose Luis, 'Arturo Barea, pendiente,' La Vanguardia, Barcelona 8/5/86. Gonzalez Lopez, Emilio, Untitled, Revista (Columbia University), New York, Dec. 1953. Herrera Rodrigo, Maria, (Badajoz 1988). Howe, 1947.

Irving,

Introduction to:

'The forging of a rebel,'

una

Hi spanica

asignatura

Moderna,

El centro de la pista, Partisan Review,

Summer

Ortega, Jose, 'Arturo Barea, novelista espafiol en busca de identidad,' Symposium, Syracuse, Winter 1971, pp. 377-391.

300

su

Orwell, George, 'The Forge,' review In Time and Tide, 1941) . orwell, George, 'The Forge,' review in Horizon, 1941), pp 214-217. Pecellin, Manuel, 'Arturo Barea Ogazon,' Extremadura II, (Universitas, Salamanca 1981). Pont, Jaume, Introduction Barcelona 1986) .

to

Valor

y

Miedo,

(London, July

(London, September in

Li teratura (Plaza

Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, 'The forging of a rebel,' 2/5/52. (Review of first Spanish-language edition) .

en

y

Janes,

TLS,

London

Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, 'Arturo Barea, una voz,' 29/12/57. (Eulogy broadcast the week after Barea's death at Juan de Castilla's normal time) . Rodriguez Richart, J., 'Valor y miedo y La forja de un rebelde, de Arturo Barea,' Anthropos, No. 148 (Barcelona, September 1993), pp. 72-76. Ruiz Ayucar, Angel, 'Arturo Barea, Madrid 18/8/57. Ruiz Ayucar, Angel, untitled,

0

la forja de un hombre,' Arriba,

Arriba (?), Madrid 21/1/58.

Sender, Ramon J., 'The Spanish Autobiography of Arturo Barea,' New Leader, 11/1/47, p.12. Sender, Ramon J., review of The broken root, New York Times Book Review, 11/3/51, p.4. Sunen, Luis, 'Arturo Barea,' Camp de l'Arpa, Barcelona, March 1979. Thomas, Hugh, 'Spain Before the Falange,' review of The forging of a rebel, The Nation, 3/5/75, pp.535-6. de Torre, G., 'Arturo Barea, La forj a de un rebe Ide,' (Buenos Aires 1951), pp. 60-65.

Sur,

205,

Valls, Maria Antonia, 'El rostro de Arturo Barea,' Telepais, No.79, Ailo III, Madrid 13/4/90. Yndurain, Francisco, 'Resentimiento espanol. Arturo Barea,' Arbor, XXIV, Madrid, enero 1953, No. 85.

301

3. Books containing in-depth studies of Arturo Barea. Alborg, Juan Luis, Hora actual de la novela espafiola Madrid 1968), tomo II. '

(Taurus,

conte, Rafael, Narraciones Barcelona 1970) .

desterrada,

(Edhasa,

(Las Americas,

New York

Devlin, 1966) .

John,

de

la

Espafia

Spanish Anticlericalism,

Fernandez Gutierrez, Jose Maria, y Herrera Rodrigo, Maria, La narrativa de la guerra civil: Arturo Barea, (PPU, Barcelona 1988). Marra-Lopez, Jose R., Narrativa espafiola fuera de Espafia 1961), (Guadarrama, Madrid 1963).

(1939-

Miller, John C., Los testimonios literarios de la guerra espafio1marroqui: Arturo Barea, Jose Diaz Fernandez, Ernesto Gimenez Caballero, Ram6n Sender. (Unpublished thesis, Ann Arbor 1978). de Nora, Eugenio, La nove1a espafiola contemporanea, (Gredos, Madrid 1970), tomos II and III. Perez Minik, Domingo, Novelistas espafio1es de los sig10s X1X y XX, (Guadarrama, Madrid 1957) . Rodriguez Monegal, Emir, Tres testigos espafio1es de 1a guerra civil, (Editorial Arte, Caracas 1971).

4. General background books and articles.

There are, of course, a phenomenal number of books about the period during which Barea lived, especially the Civil War. I have restricted this list to: a) books/articles with at least one reference to Barea, b) key background books, such as the ones by Fraser or Abella, c) books which I have directly referred to in the text, e.g. Ackroyd or Crick. Abella, Rafael, La vida cotidiana durante 1a guerra civil, (Planeta, Barcelona 1975) AbelIan, Jose Luis, 'El exodo republicano,' Historia 16, Mo II, (Madrid, November 1977), No. 19. Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens,

(Sinclair Stevenson, London 1990) .

Aranguren, Jose Luis 'La evolucion espiritual de los intelectuales espafioles en la emig~acion" Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, (febrero 1953), No. 38.

302

Ayala, Francisco, Barcelona 1984).

La

estructura

narrativa,

(Editorial

Critica,

Ayala, Francisco, Memorias y recuerdos, (Alianza Tres, Madrid 1988) . Baker, Carlos, Ernest Hemingway,

(Collins, London 1969) .

Barea, Ilsa, Vienna, legend and reality, 1966) .

(Seeker & Warburg, London

Bolloten, Burnett, La Guerra civil espanola, (Alianza, Madrid 1989) . Brenan, Gerald, The Spanish Labyrinth, (Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1943). ' Brenan, Gerald, The Li terature of the Spanish people, University Press, Cambridge 1951).

(Cambridge

Broue, Pierre and Temime, Emile, The Revolution and the Civil War in Spain, (Faber & Faber, London 1972) . Caro Baroja, Julio, in: 1969), pr6logo, pp.7-13.

Baroja,

La busca,

Pio,

(Salvat, Madrid

Carr, E.H., The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War, London 1984) . Carr, Raymond, Espana 1808-1975,

(Macmillan,

(Ariel, Barcelona 1982).

Carr, Raymond, The Spanish Tragedy,

(Weidenfeld, London 1993) .

de la Cierva, Ricardo, Francisco (Editora Nacional, Madrid 1973) .

Franco,

un

Claudin, Fernando, From Comintern to Cominform, Press, Oxford 1975) . Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: a life,

siglo

de Espana,

(Oxford University

(Penguin, London 1982) .

Delmer, Sefton, Trail sinister, (Seeker Includes description of Barea as censor.

&

Warburg, London 1961).

Dos Passos, John, Journeys between wars, (Houghton Mifflin, New York 1937) . Ehrenburg, 1963) .

Ilya,

Eve of war 1933-1941,

(Macgibbon

&

Kee,

London

Esteban J. and Santorja G., Los novelistas sociales espanoles (19281936), (Anthropos, Barcelona 1988) . Juan Ignacio, Tendencias de la novela espanola actual 1939-1969, (Ediciones Hispanoamericanas, Paris 1970). Ferreras,

Fraser, Ronald, The blood of Spain,

303

(Allen Lane, London 1979) .

Garcia Lorca, F., Poems, (The Dolphin Press, London 1939), translated by Stephen Spender and Joan Gili, and introduced by R.M.Nadal. Garcia Marquez, Madrid 1991) .

Notas de prensa 1980-1984,

Gabriel,

Garosci, Aldo, Los intelectuales y la Guerra de Espana Jucar, Madrid 1981) . '

(Mondadori, (Ediciones

Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan, The interior castle a life of Gerald Brenan, (Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1992). CoW:ents on Barea's and Brenan's visits to each other in 1943. Gellhorn, Martha, The face of war,

(Hart-Davis, London 1959).

Gonzalez, Valentin, 'El Campesino,' and Gorkin, Julian, Life and death in Soviet Russia, (Heinemann, London 1952). Translated into English by lIsa Barea. Graham, Helen, Socialism and war, Cambridge 1991).

(Cambridge University Press,

Gubern, Roman and others, Madrid 1995) .

Historia

del

Hemingway, Ernest, By-line,

(Penguin, London 1969) .

Knightley, Phillip, The first casualty,

cine espanol,

(Catedra,

(Pan, London 1989) .

Lee, Laurie, Un instante en la guerra, (Muchnik, Barcelona 1995). Contains account of a radio broadcast from Madrid. Lukacs, Georg, Studies in European Realism, 1972) . de Madariaga, Salvador, Spain,

(Merlin Press, London

(Jonathan Cape, London 1942) .

Mansell, Gerard, Let truth be told, (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1982). Describes conflicts over broadcasts to Spain during WW2. Martinez Nadal, Rafael, Antonio Torres y la politica espanola del , Foreign Office', (Casariego, Madrid 1989) . Mcinerney, Jay, 'Fi tzgerald revisited,' New York Review of Books, 15/8/91, pp. 23-28. Orwell, George, The lion and the unicorn,

(Penguin, London 1986) .

Payne, Stanley, Politics and military in modern Spain, Press, Stanford 1967) . Payne, Stanley, Falange,

(University

(Sarpe, Madrid 1985) .

Payne, Stanley, Spain's first democracy, the Second Republic, 19311936, (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee 1993).

304

ed. Preston, 1984) . Regier, 1959) .

Paul,

Gustav,

Revolution and war ~n Spain,

The

owl

of Minerva,

(Methuen,

London

(Rupert Hart-Davis,

London

Renier , Olive and Rubinstein, Vladimir, Assigned to listen, (BBC External Services, London 1986). Includes references to the Bareas at Evesham. Ressot, Jean-Pierre, Historia de la Literatura espanola, Siglo XX, (Ariel, Barcelona 1995), Tomo VI. Romera Castillo, Madrid 1980/1) . ed.

Jose,

La

l i teratura,

s~gno

autobiografico,

(??,

Schneider,

Marshall, J. & Stern, Irwin, Modern Spanish and Portuguese Literatures, (Continuum, New York 1988) .

Seale, Patrick and McConville, Maureen, Philby, The long road to Moscow, (Penguin, London 1978). Refers to lisa Pollak's role in the Vienna events of February 1934. Serrano Poncela, Segundo, 'La novela espanola contemporanea,' Torre, 2, Puerto Rico 1953, pp. 105 - 128. ed. Socialist Platform, The Spanish Civil War: the left, (Revolutionary History, London 1992). Spiel, Hilde, London 1987) .

Vienna's

Thomas, Gareth, Cambridge 1990).

The

golden

novel

of

autumn, the

Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish Civil War,

(Weidenfeld

Spani sh

Ci vi 1

v~ew

&

War,

La

from the

Nicholson, (C. U . P . ,

(Penguin, London 1965).

Trapiello, Andres, Las armas y las letras. Literatura y guerra civil (1936-1939), (Planeta, Barcelona 1994) . Tunon de Lara, Manuel, 1978). Three volumes.

La Espana

del

Siglo XX,

(Laia, Barcelona

Tunon de Lara, Paloma, 'La novela durante la guerra civil,' Historia 16, (Madrid 1986), No. 17. Williams, Philip M., Hugh Gaitskell,

305

(O.U.P., Oxford, 1982).

5. Works of fiction. This list is restricted to works of fiction referred to in the thesis.

Aub, Max, Campo eerrado,

(Alfaguara, Madrid 1978) .

Aub, Max, Campo abierto,

(Alfaguara, Madrid 1978) .

Baroja, Pio, El mundo es ansi, (Espasa Calpe, Madrid 1973) . Baroja, Pio, La busea,

(Salvat, Madrid 1969) .

Cela, Camilo J., La familia de Pascual Duarte (Ediciones Destino, Barcelona 1969) . Cela, Camilo J., La eolmena, (Ediciones Destino, Barcelona 1986). Cela, Camilo J., The Hive,

(Gollancz, London 1953) .

Diaz Fernandez, Jose, El blocao,

(Cenit, Madrid 1935) .

Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield, Dos Passos, John, U.S.A.,

Gironella, 1976) .

Jose Maria,

(Penguin, London 1976).

Los

Gironella, Jose Maria, Barcelona 1976) .

(Penguin, London 1985) .

c~preses

creen

en

Un mil16n de muertos,

Goytisolo, Juan, Marks of Identity,

Dios,

(Planeta,

(Planeta, Barcelona

(Serpent's tail, London 1988).

Guiraldes, Ricardo, Don Segundo Sombra, (Penguin, London 1959) . Hemingway, Ernest, For whom the Bell Tolls, Originally published 1940.

(Penguin, London 1966) .

Hemingway, Ernest, The Fifth Column, (Penguin, London 1968) . Istrati, Panait, Los eardos de Baragan, not dated -- c.1980). Laforet, Carmen, Nada (Ediciones Originally published 1945. Malraux, Andre, Man's hope, English of L'espoir (1937).

(Ediciones 29, Barcelona,

Destino,

Barcelona

1984).

(Penguin, London 1969). Translation to

Miller, Henry, Big Sur and the oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, (New York 1957) . Remarque, Erich Maria, All quiet on the western front, 1974) . Sender, Ramon J., published 1930.

Iman,

(Destino,

306

Barcelona

1983).

(Pan, London Originally

Sender, Ram6n J., Cr6nica del alba, (Destino, Barcelona 1987). Nine novels in 3 volumes. Sender, Ram6n J., Siete domingos rojos, (Destino, Barcelona 1985). Sender, Ram6n J., The dark wedding, (Grey Walls, Translation of Epitalamio de la Santa Trinidad. Sender, Ram6n J., Barcelona 1984). Serge, Victor, 1977) .

Requi em por un

Birth of our power,

Serge, Victor, Conquered city,

campesino

London 1948).

espanol,

(Des tino,

(Writers and readers,

London

(Victor Gollancz, London 1976) .

Serge, Victor, Year one of the Russian Revol ution, Readers, London 1978). de Unamuno, Miguel, Paz en la guerra,

307

(Wri ters and

(Espasa Calpe, Madrid 1968) .